The Yale Problem Begins in High School

A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

After my main lecture, the next session involved 60 students who had signed up for further discussion with me. We moved to a large classroom. The last thing I wanted to do was to continue the same fruitless arguing for another 75 minutes, so I decided to take control of the session and reframe the discussion. Here is what happened next:

Me: What kind of intellectual climate do you want here at Centerville? Would you rather have option A: a school where people with views you find offensive keep their mouths shut, or B: a school where everyone feels that they can speak up in class discussions?

Audience: All hands go up for B.

Me: OK, let’s see if you have that. When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? Or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells ]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free].

Me: Now let’s try it for race. When a topic related to race comes up in class, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking, or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the non-white students? [the group was around 30% non-white, mostly South and East Asians, and some African Americans. A majority said they felt free to speak, although a large minority said eggshells] Now just the white students? [A large majority said eggshells]

Me: Now lets try it for politics. How many of you would say you are on the right politically, or that you are conservative or Republican? [6 hands went up, out of 60 students]. Just you folks, when politically charged topics come up, can you speak freely? [Only one hand went up, but that student clarified that everyone gets mad at him when he speaks up, but he does it anyway. The other 5 said eggshells.] How many of you are on the left, liberal, or democrat? [Most hands go up] Can you speak freely, or is it eggshells? [Almost all said they can speak freely.]

Me: So let me get this straight. You were unanimous in saying that you want your school to be a place where people feel free to speak up, even if you strongly dislike their views. But you don’t have such a school. In fact, you have exactly the sort of “tolerance” that Herbert Marcuse advocated [which I had discussed in my lecture, and which you can read about here]. You have a school in which only people in the preferred groups get to speak, and everyone else is afraid. What are you going to do about this? Let’s talk.

After that, the conversation was extremely civil and constructive. The boys took part just as much as the girls. We talked about what Centerville could do to improve its climate, and I said that the most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority. On the entire faculty, there was not a single teacher that was known to be conservative or Republican. So if these teenagers are coming into political consciousness inside of a “moral matrix” that is uniformly leftist, there will always be anger directed at those who disrupt that consensus.

That night, after I gave a different talk to an adult audience, there was a reception at which I spoke with some of the parents. Several came up to me to tell me that their sons had told them about the day’s events. The boys finally had a way to express and explain their feelings of discouragement. Their parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and… there’s no other word for it, bullied into submission by the girls.*

And Centerville High is not alone. Last summer I had a conversation with some boys who attend one of the nation’s top prep schools, in New England. They reported the same thing: as white males, they are constantly on eggshells, afraid to speak up on any remotely controversial topic lest they be sent to the “equality police” (that was their term for the multicultural center). I probed to see if their fear extended beyond the classroom. I asked them what they would do if there was a new student at their school, from, say Yemen. Would they feel free to ask the student questions about his or her country? No, they said, it’s too risky, a question could be perceived as offensive.

You might think that this is some sort of justice — white males have enjoyed positions of privilege for centuries, and now they are getting a taste of their own medicine. But these are children. And remember that most students who are in a victim group for one topic are in the “oppressor” group for another. So everyone is on eggshells sometimes; all students at Centerville High learn to engage with books, ideas, and people using the twin habits of defensive self-censorship and vindictive protectiveness.

So they issue ultimatums to college presidents, and, as we saw at Yale, the college presidents meet their deadlines, give them much of what they demanded, commit their schools to an ever tighter embrace of victimhood culture, and say nothing to criticize the bullying, threats, and intimidation tactics that have created a culture of intense fear for anyone who might even consider questioning the prevailing moral matrix. What do you suppose a conversation about race or gender will look like in any Yale classroom ten years from now? Who will dare to challenge the orthodox narrative imposed by victimhood culture? The “Next Yale” that activists are demanding will make today’s Centerville High look like Plato’s Academy by comparison.

The only hope for Centerville High — and for Yale — is to disrupt their repressively uniform moral matrices to make room for dissenting views. High schools and colleges that lack viewpoint diversity should make it their top priority. Race and gender diversity matter too, but if those goals are pursued in the ways that student activists are currently demanding, then political orthodoxy is likely to intensify. Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out non-leftist faculty, and they should explicitly include viewpoint diversity and political diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination.** Parents and students who value freedom of thought should take viewpoint diversity into account when applying to colleges. Alumni should take it into account before writing any more checks.

The Yale problem refers to an unfortunate feedback loop: Once you allow victimhood culture to spread on your campus, you can expect ever more anger from students representing victim groups, coupled with demands for a deeper institutional commitment to victimhood culture, which leads inexorably to more anger, more demands, and more commitment. But the Yale problem didn’t start at Yale. It started in high school. As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimizers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.

* * * * *

Post Scripts:

*My original draft of this post included the phrase “with the blessing of the teachers” at this point. But this was unfair and I regret it. The Centerville teachers I met were all very friendly to me, even after my talk. I think they could do more to counter the intimidation felt by students with minority viewpoints, but I have no reason to think that the teachers at Centerville are anything other than caring professionals who try to curate class discussions without inserting their own views. Indeed, the comments from “Centerville” students below, in the comment threads, indicate that the intimidation comes primarily from other students, not from the teachers. This is a pattern I have seen at universities as well.

**To help high schools and colleges measure the scale of their problem, we at Heterodox Academy will develop an “Eggshellometer” – a simple anonymous survey that can be distributed to all students, or to all faculty for that matter – that can be used to quantify the degree to which members of an academic community live in fear. In the meantime, if you are a teacher, you can use the simple “show of hands” method that I described above, or you can easily turn it into an anonymous paper and pencil survey.

*** To read a new post extracting the 13 comments below from “Centerville High” students, with commentary, click here.

There is no video of my talk at Centerville, but here is a video of an earlier version of the talk that I gave a few weeks earlier, at Yale (coincidentally). My talk at Centerville was very similar (although I cut the “stare rape” slide for the high school audience)

Thank you Dr. Haidt for the article. Your comment about boys in High School feeling cowed leads me to suggest one possible factor. My two young boys attended an elementary school where the only adult male was the Janitor. They were often being sent to the Principals office. Later we moved and my youngest, who has a touch of ADHD, is in Grade 5 and is attending a school that is more gender balanced. The Principal, Vice Principal and his home room teacher are all male. He has adjusted very well and has, over a one year period, not been sent to see the Principal once. I empathize with young boys in elementary school, who are being brought up in an overly estrogen rich environment.

I’m an idealist, sometimes leaning left, sometimes right, depending on the issue. My wish is absurdly simple. I wish everyone would live by the Golden Rule and stop insulting each other and stop trying to be better than each other. Blaming others and twisting arguments to one’s own benefit seem to be growing art forms — on all sides — and it isn’t progress, although the pedantic summaries are impressive. We can’t ignore each other anymore. We’re like rats in an overcrowded cage, turning on each other because we have to live with each other and although many don’t like that idea, it’s reality. It’s time to stop trying to manufacture reality into a perfectly controlled environment. Our goals need to be compatible instead of at odds; we need to aim for harmony. That might mean forgiving. It might mean listening for a change. It means opening our minds to see damage we’ve inflicted and errant thinking we’ve held onto. We need to learn how to respect each other and care. I’m talking about ALL SIDES.

This can be seen in the current political climate where those who are angry at walking on eggshells finally speak up. But they have no experience in doing so and play their own victim card: “The other side is cheating” when the problem is that the victim-players just don’t know the way the game is played.

While the ideal of Strengthen U is a good one, it assumes that minority groups enjoy equal protection under the institutions of the university and government, which they simply do not. I am a grad student a majority white university in a part of the country that at one point enshrined slavery. To this day students of color (not just Black) are denied entrance to supposedly equal opportunity campus organizations, especially Frats and Sororities, and Black students especially face far higher risk or persecution by police, as do Blacks generally.

In your Strengthen v. Coddle article you propose students defend themselves against racial slurs (for example), rather than having administration intervene on your behalf. First, this assumes the victim isn’t physically threatened by the hate speech, which unfortunately isn’t a fair assumption at this point in history. Second, hate speech may well point to more egregious hate acts, from the perpetrator denying entrance to the victim to an organization to committing violence against that group later. Hate speech shouldn’t be tolerated precisely because it doesn’t just exist in the realm of ideas, but in the context of the university often translates to more harmful actions. Even if it doesn’t, the fact remains that calling a minority group (especially Muslims these days) a slur is far more threatening than using similar speech with other groups. Nor does such speech have any intellectual merit. I understand tolerating (and encouraging) conservative viewpoints, but straight-up hate speech? That’s naive.

Bottom line, to reach the ideal of Strengthen U we need to better… Protect U–and there is a difference between coddling and protection.

“The only hope for Centerville High — and for Yale — is to disrupt their repressively uniform moral matrices to make room for dissenting views. … Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out non-leftist faculty, and they should explicitly include viewpoint diversity and political diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination.”

You are proposing that the school make an explicit effort to determine the ideologies of their candidates and hire or reject them based on that ideology, in an effort to bring the number of “non-leftist” mathematics teachers up to an appropriate or comfortable standard.

This is a fundamentally illiberal idea.

And reaching in with this vicious, hostile external political pressure to try to force it, that is unethical. And calling it “viewpoint diversity” is Orwellian. I guess you’re trying to pattern it after affirmative action and diversity efforts, but affirmative action itself is already in direct contradiction with liberal principles of equality. It is a compromise made in extraordinary circumstances. And one of the main reasons why that compromise is possible is because a person’s race or gender or sexual orientation does not determine their opinion. Opinion is exactly the one thing that must never be a protected and sheltered category, because opinions are /not/ born equal; an opinion can be /wrong/. And yet you and Greg want to write into the school rules things like, “to preserve diversity of politics, a certain number of teachers must be non-leftist.”

I realize that it is uncomfortable to hold a certain political opinion when pretty much everyone else disagrees with you – in school, in the workplace, or in the military. But that is not the kind of extraordinary circumstance that would justify ideological affirmative action. And this is not only a conservative experience.

Are you prepared to say that you want the government to come in and make sure a sufficient percentage of soldiers are non-rightist? That is self-evidently ridiculous and it makes ten times more sense than what you are proposing.

Are you prepared to be hired at a certain warehouse because they needed more conservatives? (You aren’t a conservative, but you checked the box because you needed the job.)

Are you ready to live in a society where you compete to have the most diverse viewpoint?

—

Well, and I had better talk about the rest of the article also, I don’t want to be accused of cherry picking. The part above is supposed to be more or less a coherent whole, but the stuff below is just bits and pieces.

—

I.

“I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. … After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. … And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward. …”

Sounds like uniformity to me! Seriously, are the political divisions in this school supposed to be half-and-half boy and girl, or uniform leftism, or what? It doesn’t sound like your speech has anything to do with gender, but then you say “After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male,” as though this made sense to you in context.

—

II.

“And then… they go off to college and learn new ways to gain status by expressing collective anger at those who disagree. They curse professors and spit on visiting speakers at Yale. They shut down newspapers at Wesleyan. They torment a dean who was trying to help them at Claremont McKenna. They threaten and torment fellow students at Dartmouth. And in all cases, they demand that adults in power DO SOMETHING to punish those whose words and views offend them.”

As Lincoln Steffens wrote, “I feel that I know something the wise men do not know about crime waves…”

—

III.

“When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? … Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free]”

Yes, this is normal and not a modern phenomenon. The boys are hesitant and careful when they comment on “gender issues” (aka women’s issues). I am hesitant and careful when I comment on men’s issues like prison rape and suicide. And I definitely don’t think anyone wants to hear my controversial opinions about the Jews.

—

IV.

“Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video…”

…in which a student yells at a professor to “be quiet” and that he is “disgusting,” but fortunately Greg is there and is recording this outrageous provocateur, so the politically unacceptable viper can be quickly identified and struggled out of the university. And I’m not fucking exaggerating. As the Daily Caller writes:

“J― L― is vanishing from more than just social media. While she was on the list of ―― as recently as Nov. 6, she’s disappeared from the current page, indicating that she may have quit her post. She also had a profile page at the website for her mother’s company, ――, but that page has now vanished as well.”

And here’s the American Conservative:

“I believe nothing will happen to the foul-mouthed J― L―. … I would be very happy to be shown that I am wrong. … UPDATE: I didn’t realize when I posted that excerpt from the Daily Caller that it contained a link to her family’s home address.”

The dashes are, of course, mine, since none of you guys give a shit. I hope this also explains why my name is “Anonymous” and my email is temporary.

—

V.

“So if these teenagers are coming into political consciousness inside of a ‘moral matrix’ that is uniformly leftist…”

No, it’s the older generation of university students that grew up inside of ‘a moral matrix that was uniformly leftist’ – reading Doonesbury and Mark Twain and Mad Magazine and all the other standard liberal pablum, or perhaps reading Rand in their twenties and being completely blown away by the novelty of it. And you did, as you say, grow up really fragile. Think of Scott Aaronson finding Dworkin in the library and driving himself nearly insane with self-loathing because he couldn’t find a feminist book that said “By the way, men, don’t drive yourself insane with self-loathing”! He was traumatized for life by an encounter with diverse political thought.

Those people in the audience aren’t angry because they grew up reading a friendly, consistent array of mildly challenging liberal classics. They are angry precisely because they have been exposed to the full force of the moral matrix of the right wing and Planet Kill Yourself, and –

“then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had.”

Gosh! The most unremittingly hostile lecture you’ve ever given, and then, out of nowhere, the most unremittingly hostile questioning you’ve ever had! So you have this incredible Frankenstein’s monster of a teenager: constantly exposed to and thriving under intense hatred from diametrically opposed political opinions, able to give and take powerful rhetorical blows, but probably really fragile though I guess.

Oh, and how could I forgot – also, he is insane! The teenager is insane! He has all twelve of the seventeen common kinds of cognitive distortion. This is clear to me from the three sentences he just said. Everyone with this political opinion is insane.

I don’t know where to start:

VI. Don’t diagnose your political opponents with mental disorders.

VII. You’re not a /clinical/ psychologist.

VIII. Okay, so, that is a list of types of distorted thinking in depression. I’m sure you know that. How does it have any relevance at all to politics?

The answer is to defund Progressive worldview education in K-12, university, law schools and Journalism schools. Replace the pedagogy with “1776-Tragic-Liberty” worldview ed.

It is how to restore a Republic that has not been kept. This needs to be done before a Convention of the States can be trusted to amend the Constitution back unto a Republic. But after Prog ed is defunded, the Hydra heads of Prog Idiocracy will cease to be.

Also, it is an endless loop activity, not to mention cruel, to mock college students who act like dumb Progressive Hydra heads. We should have empathy on their brainwashing and rape-of-brains, and defund Progressive worldview ed in K-12, university, law schools and Journalism schools.

Lastly, Jungle Law (The principle that those who are strong and apply ruthless self-interest will be most successful) is the bottom line ethos of Progressivism, since Progressivism is based on Hegel’s maxim: “No proposition can be proved true”… so basically Prog ed creates the worst of worst leaders, such as a Clinton who says “it depends on what is is” or “what does it matter at this point”… because nobody can live and personally act out Hegel’s ideas (or say, for example they would drive on the freeway in the wrong direction… which nobody sane does) they just use Hegel to think themselves superior when using Jungle Law on folks to rob & kill them.

I do think the problem starts before college but I think it is due to the teaching in high school. I am a high school teacher and I do not feel like I have the ability to speak freely. The staff and tone both in my school and district tends to be very liberal at times. I am not liberal and feel that I must censor myself constantly. The problem extends into the classroom where teachers are not encouraged to express themselves freely. The constant focus is the Common Core and the agenda of teaching standards with no cultural, political, or spiritual context. In fact, at times there is no context outside of the standard itself. We learn these standards because we learn them. My students do not really know what they think about important issues. They have often been coddled through their high school years. Is it any mystery why they want it to continue? Most of my students have no idea what is happening on the college campuses they plan on attending. My fear is that they will get caught up in that negative group-thought because they are ill prepared to see it for what it is, tyranny.

“…the most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority…” Jonathan Haidt

For me the Social Sciences can be saved by opening the paths of discussion, particularly to dissenters, of which I am an active one. The academic Social Sciences has developed a brilliant and seamless system for preventing fresh information from percolating into the academic world. And when did new ideas become ‘offensive’ to old readers? Darwin would never have been published today. Even distinguished scientists such as Jerry Coyne are over-active in suppressing new information. His site is heavily censored. He calls my views ‘taking a pop at the Social Sciences’, and is ruthless in suppression. It is up to him if he wants to throw his reputation on the wrong side of history, but my new hypothesis will surely and slowly become available, perhaps to a younger generation. Some suggest I try to get it Peer Reviewed, but when you look at the way in which Darwin’s Cambridge tutor savagely reviewed ‘Origins…’ you can have little faith in Peer Review when it comes to original ideas.

I conceived of a new understanding of The Social Sciences that demonstrates that all research contained under that umbrella generate, not knowledge, but something called a ‘Solution-Ideology’. The History of Ideas is a history of ‘Solution-Ideologies’ such as the religions, astrology, the Four Humours theory of bodily function, and so forth. The word ‘atheism’ is sufficient in some to throw effective doubts in to the minds of religious people. And so the new phrase, ‘Solution-Ideology’ should signal a possible doubt upon the ten million published books on the Social Sciences.

Mine is a new and complex theory with a great mass of evidence behind it.
My research over 50 years is that by means of Social Self-Selection, all working under the Social Sciences have come to represent cults, and their beliefs are unavailable to those who do not buy-in to the false assumptions underpinning each discipline. A ‘Solution-Ideology’ is a temporary belief based upon a collection of false assumptions about human nature, and that false basis provides a means by which all human activity can be explained away. This is the beginning of a complex set of theories, and it is best not to dismiss it until you understand it. The chapter outlining in detail those false assumptions under each of the Social Sciences is an impressive read.

A am writing it out and the first part is freely available on the internet. I would love to know if I am on the right lines, or if I am mistaken in some way. Of course, if I am right, then ‘The Origins of Belief and Behaviour’ will go down in history as a document of some importance. The problem is that The Social Sciences are so damned effective in keeping out new ideas. Link to half-finished book

I can easily surround myself with classmates and teachers who agree with me.

If I speak up in class, I can be confident my political views are more likely to be warmly supported than greeted with hostility.

I can be confident that the political beliefs I hold and the political candidates I support will not be routinely mocked

I can be pretty confident that, if I present an argument in support of my political views, I will not be mocked or insulted.

I can be pretty confident that, if I present an argument in support of my political views, those arguments will be discussed on their merits rather than on the basis of whether I hold any particularly “privileged” social statuses.

I can paint caricature-like pictures based on the most extreme and irrational beliefs of those who differ from me ideologically without feeling any penalty for doing so.

I can criticize ideas and policies that differs from mine on issues such as race, sex, or politics without fear of being accused of being an authoritarian, racist, or sexist

I can systematically misinterpret, misrepresent, or ignore scientific research in such a manner as to sustain my political views and be confident that such misinterpretations, misrepresentations, or oversights are unlikely to be recognized.

I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of my school life.

I do not have to worry that my teachers will downgrade my work on politicized topics because they do not like my views.

I can be confident that vanishingly few teachers or students will claim that people holding political beliefs like mine are particularly deficient in intelligence and morality.

Imagine you’re a boy in high school who is anally raped with a stick by 3 male ‘friends.’ The doctor says you have serious, permanent colon damage and notifies the school. That night, you can’t sleep and replay the event in your mind over and over. The torture of reliving it and knowing you will see these boys again e-v-e-r-y school day causes you to seriously contemplate suicide.

The next day, the principal comes to your class and announces there will be an open discussion about what happened. The 3 boys brag about what they did and high-five each other, mocking you in front of the whole class. You can’t believe what is happening. WTF! You start to uncontrollably cry, which makes classmates tease you even more. You wonder how, after what you just went through, they could treat you this way. You become very angry and the principal tells you to calm down or you will be suspended. You are stunned into silence.

The police refuse to charge the boys with any crime–they state that it wasn’t ‘real’ rape, and you consented, anyway. For the rest of high school, people cruelly tease you about what happened. You suspect you have PTSD.

Then, you attend Strengthen U. Your professor starts an open discussion about “toughening people up.” Someone brings up frat hazing. A frat boy says that he personally has anally raped a pledge who wasn’t expecting it, and he believes it did help toughen the pledge up. He says that the pledge should THANK him and carry on the tradition by doing it to future pledges. The class (which is mostly frat boys) nods in agreement. At this point, you lose your s*** and yell at the openly proud rapist. It takes everything you have to not kill this guy right now.

The professor berates you for “trying to shut down an open discussion.” You explain privately that you have been raped and it did NOT make you stronger. You believe it ruined your life and would have ended it had suicide not been against your religion. The professor pats you on the head and condescendingly informs you that you’re wrong to feel angry–feeling that way is part of a “victim culture” and you will eventually see how this discussion helped strengthen you. In fact, he suggests you pledge the frat boy’s fraternity to prove that you’re no victim…!

Look, people become enraged by certain “open” discussions suggested here because they have had a lifetime of unfair situations and shocking levels of insensitivity thrown at them (of course, not necessarily rape-related). These people are not trying to shut down free speech–they are trying to stop you from creating yet another extremely painful and unfair situation that they will have to endure. The fact that you don’t see it as an unfair situation is a product of not having lived through the extensive amount of unfairness that others have. That is what people mean here when they mention “white male privilege”–they mean that you just don’t understand the extent of the situation until you live it.

Haidt’s solution of viewpoint diversity for college faculty might be unattainable. It’s going to be hard to find educated critical thinkers who support the the basic Republican position that regressive taxation is good for the economy and for democracy. Likewise, it’ll be hard to find such thinkers who deny global warming and evolution but believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that corporations are people who should be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political candidates.

1) You can commit a crime and your local newspaper usually won’t mention what party you’re in if you’re a Democrat.
2) You can be a white liberal who viciously mocks black men like Clarence Thomas, Allen West, and Ben Carson without being called a racist.
4) You can live in a mansion, fly around in private jets and consume more energy than a small town and still be taken seriously when you say we need to cut back on our lifestyles to fight global warming.
5) You can hold a conference like Netroots Nation that’s as white as any Tea Party without having people suggest that your event is somehow “racist” for not having more minorities present.
8) You have the option of sending your kids to a liberal school, watching liberal news, and then enjoying liberal TV shows so that your insular liberal world never has to be shaken by actual conservatives explaining their ideas.
12) You can have millions of dollars in the bank and not be laughed at when you complain about all those awful rich people ruining the country.

Re this idea that white males are inherently privileged: I speak as someone living in the UK. I can’t help noticing that the binmen (people who empty the trash) are 99% privileged, in every part of the UK I know. When I point out that, for instance, Asians are poorly represented in the binmen workforce, and they might want to redress that imbalance, I never get any takers.

I think the problem may be starting long before high school. Kids are being taught from the time of preschool to that they are delicate beings whose feelings need to be protected. Zero tolerance. Everyone gets a trophy. They don’t even keep score in Little League until the kids are 8 years old. There’s a mercy rule so kids won’t experience being beaten badly. Get a 10 run lead and the game is over. In AYSO soccer, teams are required to stop scoring goals once they go ahead by 5. Can’t let the losing team feel bad.

I think this article is confusing quite different phenomena as what it terms a single “Yale problem.” For one thing, the author says that he gave the same talk at Yale only weeks before he gave it at Centerville, but he does not mention his receiving anything like the same kind of hostile questioning at Yale as he did at Centerville. If the Centerville mindset is a reflection of some single “Yale problem,” then why didn’t the problem manifest itself at Yale?

Further, the problematic mindset at Centerville seems to have infected a quite substantial portion of the female student body there.

But reports out of Yale do not suggest a politically correct orthodoxy imposed by activists on the students body generally. Quite the contrary. The activists seem to be personally unhappy and alienated from the general student body. Several of their “demands” (including universal sensitivity training) indicate that alienation. And very few Yale students are reported to have actively participated in the problematic events there. For example, the screaming student certainly has not received general support from other Yalies: She reportedly had to take down her Facebook and other social media pages because the response – including from other Yale students – was so immediate and overwhelmingly negative. I can’t tell from the video of the Christakis screaming incident what the number of finger snappers was, but it does not seem to have been large. (The author does not describe the Q-and-A after his Yale talk, and I think he would have mentioned if it involved finger-snapping to support hostile questions.) Further, in the video, only the single screaming woman – not a group – seems overly aggressive, although there seem to be students politely disagreeing with Christakis, passive or just observing. It is not appropriate to assume that every student standing around agreed with what the screamer was doing or saying. Many students can be seen walking away in what seems (possibly) more like disgust. Similarly, the number of Yale students involved in the spitting incident was also reported to be quite small. Yes, perhaps 1,000 students participated in a later walk organized by the activists that devolved into a cheerful dance party, but those attending the walk and dance were in many cases other students who empathize with the obvious personal unhappiness and loneliness of many of the activists, but do not necessarily agree with most of their arguments, positions or methods (or vocabulary). The same can be said of the Yale administration. All things considered, the “Yale problem” at Yale seems to lie within a small minority of unhappy students who seem to feel marginalized in, and rather alienated from, the Yale student body as a whole. There do seem to be an unusually large number of personally unhappy female activists involved, so the author seems to be on to something there.

Fellow Centerville student,
The two are mutually exclusive. It is impossible to have the diversity of view at a place such as centerville without offending people. Contradicting someone with less privilege than you is considered offensive at centerville, so how do you intend to have your cake and eat it too?

Contradicting someone with less privilege than you is considered offensive at Centerville? I don’t think that is necessarily true, at least in my observations. What is true is that people are hesitant to bring up opposing views because they (often incorrectly) assume that bringing up an opposing view will cause them to be attacked. Of course, it is certainly true that there are instances where people are attacked for bringing up opposing views, which is obviously bad. However, for the most part, people who express opposing views are not attacked. The more those who are silent don’t express, the more convinced they are that they will be attacked for expressing opposing views when in reality, that may not necessarily be true, at least at Centerville.

Most reasonable people would agree that a diversity of ideas is good. Most reasonable people would also agree that hurting others through words is bad. As a Centerville student, I have observed that immediately after the talk, our school split into two opposite camps.

One side believed that in an exchange of information, diversity of ideas is absolutely essential. For the most part, people in this group agreed with most of Mr. Haidt’s points. Most people in this group were glad that Mr. Haidt came to speak. It is important to note that people on this side also believed that ensuring people did not feel hurt was a critical part of discussions.

The other side believed that ensuring that people were not hurt in discussions was vital. They also believed that viewpoint diversity was important. They believed that Mr. Haidt did not believe that making sure people were not hurt in discussions is important. In addition, they believed that Mr. Haidt was hostile towards women, especially in his statement that although women are just as capable as men, they are genetically less inclined to explore STEM. The majority of people in this group felt that this was incorrect. This group also felt that Mr. Haidt implicitly expressed negative views about transgender people. While this group supported the idea that viewpoint diversity was important, they felt that Mr. Haidt was expressing the view that women and minority groups should not be protected from hurtful ideas. This group felt that Mr. Haidt was not the ideal person to deliver his ideas about viewpoint diversity.

I think that the only disagreement our school had was over Mr. Haidt’s beliefs, not over whether viewpoint diversity or protecting against hostility is important. Indeed, both groups at our school believed that in discussions, it is vital to have a diversity of viewpoints expressed in a manner that does not distress others.

This is not to say that everyone fits into the two primary groups at our school. Certainly, there are people who fall outside this. However, based on what I have observed, at Centerville the vast majority students fall into one of these two camps.

Centerville Student, your position is sophistry with a sharpened point. Your device intends to pull me away from a world that might be made relatively absolute and into one that is absolutely relative. You evince no touchstones – whether philosophical, spiritual, or otherwise – and instead leap into the milling herd. This is precisely what permits you to so easily assume an equivalence between ideas (read expressed thoughts) and the reaction to expressed ideas. The result of this can only be dangerous and devolutionary, for at the slightest twinge or felt offence an ostensibly aggrieved party can terminate any positive discourse that aims at the advancement of our species.

Bother to ascend Maslowe’s crude ladder. You might well discover that on the higher rungs you will see very differently. In fact, you may reach the conclusion that if humanity is to move forward, we must accept that no thought, idea, or expression ought to ever be considered sacred. Short of this, you might as well be honest and admit that the game is really about control. In this latter scenario, collectivist herds will win only so long as those who disagree with them continue to remain silent, or do not finally decide to beat them with a club. Frankly, these are not good percentage plays, for they expect generosity of spirit and fairness where neither is initially extended. Of the silent, the perpetual danger is mistaking quiet for acquiescence or weakness. Of the brutes, the error is assuming that they will care in the least for the delicate sensibilities of the herd.

If you take a closer look at what I wrote, you will find that it is primarily an account of what I, a Centerville student, observed in the thoughts expressed by fellow students. These are not arguments (read normative statements), but observations (read positive statements), and as such, should be criticized not for logical flaws, as you do, but rather for their accuracy. By documenting the ideas of students at Centerville, I am not necessarily supporting these ideas. The only major argument I do make is that most people would agree that viewpoint diversity is good and hurting others is bad.

Let me now address your points based on my own thoughts on the topic of viewpoint diversity. You claim that ideas, or expressed thoughts, and a reaction to ideas are different. I agree, for a reaction to an idea may be another expressed thought, a physical action, an internal emotional response, or some combination of these. You note that it would be counterproductive to terminate discussion whenever someone has the slightest negative emotional response to an expressed thought. I believe that whether discussion should be terminated depends on the intent of the person expressing the thought and magnitude of the emotional response. This is based on accepted social standards in the physical realm; when I accidentally bump into someone, there is no reason to punish me. If I intentionally stab someone, obviously there is an excellent reason to penalize me. Similarly, when it comes to ideas, if I express a thought with the intent to significantly emotionally hurt someone else and it actually does significantly harm someone, then I should probably be excluded from the discussion.

You argue that no thought or idea should ever be held sacred. If by this you mean no idea should be completely protected from being challenged, I agree.

You argue that the game is about control where the collectivist herd is pitted against the silent and the brutes. You argue that the collectivist herd wishes to silence everyone else, all the while expecting generosity in return.

You have far oversimplified the game. There is no collectivist herd; instead it is a loosely tied coalition. Those that are willing to oppose the coalition are themselves a smaller, loosely tied group. Some in the coalition want to silence opposing forces while others are willing to let the opposition talk. Some expect generosity from the opposition, while others more are more realistic in their expectations. Some members on both sides attack their opponents while others are peaceful. To simplify a complex arena into a game of evil collectivists vs. silent masses + brutes severely distorts the picture.

For the most part, however, our views are surprisingly aligned. When I initially read your comment I believed you would most certainly disagree with my beliefs. Yet, once I got past your writing’s combative tone, I realized that some of your points actually made sense. Perhaps if you changed the color of your words, you would find that you could enhance the constructiveness of our discussion, something I presume you desperately desire.

I had an objectively brutal childhood. Severe, routine beatings which left visible scaring. This was so routine that there was never a moment when the scaring entirely healed before new damage was done. Serious lack of nutrition: people thought I had a medical condition because I looked like the pictures out of Auschwitz (not the near death but the crazy skinny photos). Daily role playing on how to respond if teachers/police etc questioned any of the injuries or size issues. This could last for several hours at a time. The beatings were typically done with a psychological component and were usually for things utterly outside of my control. Usually no anger involved just pure sadism. Education was despised and punished.

I routinely get told now that I have done well because I am a white male. I have succeeded in a field which has zero input from anyone that is not choosing to use my service. They have no idea what race I am and they have no idea I own the firm.

This is an extreme example but is not exaggerated for effect. I have responded with civility up until now to this behavior but I can assure you that the next person that puts what I have achieved down to my race and gender is going to have a very bad day.

Thank you Mr. Haidt for supplying the anecdotes to reveal a truth we in academia have known exists for quite some time. There is no tolerance for the conservative “other” among our young people and they are poorer for it. I suspect they may pay for it in their future careers.

nah. it’s probably like overdrinking in college. once college students get out into the world of work, most of them leave those excesses behind. human beings are adaptable. i know that doesn’t fit into your conservative pessimism and doomsday narrative.

I believe it’s more than just over drinking. If you aren’t aware, but Yale’s student outburst is not limited to just Yale – it happened at Mizzou, Claremont McKenna, Dartmouth, Rutgers, UMass-Amherst etc.

>>>> i know that doesn’t fit into your conservative pessimism and doomsday narrative.

What do you know about the conservative narrative? Don’t talk about the conservative narrative if you open your post saying what happened at Yale was due to over drinking. You show your cards of the fool you are, aided with undeserved arrogance and condescension.

I encountered the front edge of the current ethos more than a quarter-century ago, immediately before leaving law school. I had volunteered to work as a psychological counsellor to other university students and was approached by a young, white woman enrolled in women’s studies who thought that I had no place on the team, which was otherwise comprised only of females. She angrily rebuked me and said that I could not possibly advise others as I had lived a life of privilege. The fact that I was in law school, she railed, settled the matter.

Though I could have said something, I did not. I simply walked away. A week later, that same woman found me studying and meekly offered an apology. She said that I was actually the type of person that she would value as a friend. I flatly refused the offer, and informed that she was not the type of person I chose for friendship. You see, the righteous, privileged feminist had by then discovered that I had left home and became wholly self-supporting at fifteen years of age; that I had worked in dangerous underground mines and factories to pay for my university studies; that I bought all my clothes second-hand; and that I routinely only ate food that was tossed behind a grocery store. I had never in my life known privilege. The fact that white skin was stretched over me only made it appear that way.

To the ‘silent’ students whose voices are expressed so articulately above, be careful even in your post-secondary studies. I advised my own children as much before they entered the Ivy League. For as much as others might encourage you to speak out, know the dangers of a repeat of Mao’s deceptive ‘One Hundred Flowers’. The positive is that in the enforced quiet you have begun to develop keen intellects. As such, tyranny will at pains find a comfortable armchair in your future lives.

I would far rather die, than consider how others might respond to my words. My thoughts are my children and as for my children, my bocdy is there to offer such defense as it can. I really do not believe in assembling people into groups, in any way. Although all humans are very much alike, each human is unique.

As a left leaning white male, I feel a similar level of concern for the issues mentioned in the article. I taught at a public school in Oakland, CA for ten years, and can really identify with the ‘eggshells’ feeling.

It is frustrating and disheartening to have one’s experiences and reflections reflexively dismissed by the whiteman shaming Asa’s of the world. It is one of the reasons I left teaching.

After reading the publication from the culture of victimhood link though, it occurred to me that a lot of the indignation and outrage I feel over the events covered in this article is just me jumping on the victim train. Check your victimhood perhaps? Maybe we can lead by example, recognizing the inherent dignity within ourselves and others.

Marketplaces will perhaps prove a countervailing force. When non-government positions are filled, will the hiring entity prefer someone who can articulate their position, reasonable consider alternatives, handle disagreement with civility or someone who insists their’s is the only correct way and anything else is a “microaggression”?

Companies that thrive are those who challenge accepted principles and seek new ways of thinking. This does not occur in a stifled environment.

Thanks for this report and for your efforts. I’ve been producing history curriculum supplements for secondary schools for thirty years plus. My materials all stress history as a contested field and promote debate about conflicting interpretations of our past. Given that, I have long been aware of the powerful anti-intellectual tendencies in schools and colleges to discourage true, vigorous debate and dialogue in the name of “cultural sensitivity,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” etc. In spite of those terms, the movement is actually a highly intolerant effort at thought control and speech suppression. It is vital, given the current hyper-intensification of this bullying, that a real counter movement to it get underway. I applaud you and support your efforts to contribute to that.

Just about the only place there is free and open discussion these days is on the internet in chatrooms and comment sections of newspapaers and periodicals. And the reason those places are free to the point of riotousness is that many people comment anonymously and do not have to worry about retribution. In that sense we’ve returned to revolutionary times in this country when the founders often had to publish under assumed names for fear of arrest or harassment.

What you learn on the internet is that even on nominally liberal websites like the NYT and Washington Post,the populace, or at least those following political issues closely, is far more conservative than anyone realizes. Any attempts to bully or impose conformity by the left are usually scorned and exposed quickly for what they are: attempts by authoritarians to police and or dominate thought and expression.

I myself comment anonymously on a number of websites but also under my own name, which, when I publish with a facebook identity, includes mention of the highly-regarded college I attended. And yes, I find myself much more inhibited posting when my full name is attached. That is a good thing, because we also need to take responsibility for our thoughts expressed in the public sphere. Those who use anonymity to exceed the bounds of good taste and rational discourse are not improving the debate or making it more instructive. There will always be bomb throwers and trolls, but I’ve developed a pretty good repertoire of put-downs to deal with them.

So I’m not, as a conservative, as distressed as I could be. I’ve been joking about the Democrat candidates, who, when there were five of them, were all liberals from the northeast. The joke was that we had them cornered up their little liberal states. I think the situation on the campuses is similar. But then, the report by Mr. Haidt does indeed suggest that the high schools are now being similarly infected and a campaign needs to be undertaken to keep them free and open. That, afterall, is what true liberalism is about.

This is a phenomenal article that details the problem at the high school level and links it to the problem at the college level.

The one thing that I would say is that the problem here is couched as a problem of elite prep schools, where it is no doubt a major problem. But the problem is also one that has its roots in American public schools. I am a professor at a large R1 university that largely serves students with a public school background–with a large minority of students with a parochial school background–and my public school students convey that the same problems in elite prep schools detailed in this piece also characterize many public schools. How many times to we read about or hear that a public school has treated conservative students differently than liberal students?

And so the man who was feeding the crocodile, hoping it would eat him last, is discovering that it is in fact eating him first. It always does. Like the deluded intelligentsia of pre-revolutionary Russia and China who thought socialism and equality was their own pet project and they would get to control the angry tide of frenzied peasants. Just a few years later, they luckiest of them were in exile, begging in the streets of the West and the rest was eaten alive by the very peasant mob.

As a student at Centerville High School and a liberal, I enjoyed Mr. Haidt’s speech thoroughly as it was a thought-provoking experience for me. I don’t think many people actually disagreed with the fundamentals of his main point; most of us agree that we should not be coddled and that the overly PC culture emerging at some colleges is over the top. As a result, I feel that the majority of students agreed with his speech in general, hence the standing ovation at the end. That being said, there was a very vocal group of students who strongly disagreed with Mr. Haidt, resulting in the ridiculous question about him supporting rape. However, I believe that it was partially the fault of Mr. Haidt for inciting many students to anger by portraying his argument in an overly biased, polarized, and extreme manner that caused an irrational and emotion-based reaction from some members of the audience. I feel that if Haidt had wanted to convince us of the validity of the points he could have used a more moderate, logical approach rather than immediately rushing to extremes, something that outraged a few people who immediately forgot the logic in his arguments and went on the offensive, something that caused the discussion to deteriorate. While I enjoyed his presentation immensely, I would like to address some of the points in this article. For one, I think it’s ridiculous to say that the girls bully the boys. As a boy, I feel perfectly comfortable sharing my opinion, although I concede that that might be different if my views were more centrist or conservative. The part about the girls doing this supposed bullying with the “blessing of their teachers” is also, at least to the extent of my knowledge, false. During one discussion about how our cultural backgrounds effected our world views, I implied that all of us in the class supported the legalization of gay marriage, an assumption I had made based on the extremely liberal composition of our school. Our teacher quickly reminded us to not make assumptions about peoples’ political views as it could make them uncomfortable about sharing their opinions. Teachers have consistently made a strong effort to impartially moderate discussions and keep people from getting too out of hand. I’d have to agree about walking on eggshells when dealing with political ideology, race, and gender, although I don’t believe it’s as negative in the context of race in gender, as differing opinions can easily become discriminatory. On politics, however, I absolutely think the non-liberal members of our community should feel comfortable sharing their views – debating things like foreign policy or the ACA leaves room only for growth. Finally, I’d like to add that I oppose the overly PC culture that is emerging at many universities. Cancelling a yoga class due to cultural appropriation is ridiculous. Is eating ramen “cultural appropriation” from the Japanese? That girl’s outrageous outburst at Yale was, quite frankly, frightening in its irrationality. UCLA’s insane list of microaggressions (“America is a land of opportunity,” “Speak up more,” and “America is a melting pot,” to name but a few) is perplexing; it takes serious analysis to see how one could take offense from some of the statements included.
I thank Mr. Haidt for taking the time to visit our school and wish him all the best, even if I may disagree with some of what he says.

“All opinions are discriminatory about anything is [did you mean to say if?] there is no full consensus.”
That is blatantly false.
If you say that you oppose reinstating Glass-Steagal while I disagree with you, that is not discriminatory toward anyone. However, if your opinion is that Asian people are inferior, that is obviously discriminatory.

Hi, I was the one who asked the question that you quoted above: “So you think rape is OK?” I think though you quoted what I said, you left the context and other necessary information out. Before my question you stated that you didn’t encourage the use of trigger warnings.
I disagreed with your point from the beginning, but I was open to understanding the reasoning behind your statement. As you continued, you mentioned that you thought trigger warnings were meant to precede things that were considered “terrible”. You even gave the example that people often put trigger warnings in front of mentions of rape even though there was no scientific evidence that proved that people could be “re-triggered”. It was this point that pushed me into my emotions. I felt as if your comment diminished the experiences and feelings of those who have been traumatized and especially those who have experienced such a traumatizing violation like rape. I felt that your point minimized rape to an extent where you found it unnecessary to label it as triggering. Thus, it was not “terrible enough”. Paired with your previous point this pushed me to ask what was your stance on rape and whether you thought it was OK. I felt as if you didn’t express what’s considered “terrible enough” to need a warning. I do acknowledge that my question didn’t express my entire thought process and I apologize that this caused confusion.

Still, my original opinion on your presentation has not changed. I think that you as a white male shouldn’t be responsible for making the rules on how we must discuss topics like race and gender. I do not mean that you are not allowed to and I am not trying to silence your free speech. Your ideas come from a point of privilege, and biases are inevitably attached to your ideas. These biases also come from a point of privilege. No matter how many articles, books, or journals you read you will never be able to fully understand the struggles of those of us who are not privileged. This means your ideas, frankly, don’t matter as much as those who have lived a life as an underprivileged person. In my opinion, from your point of view you cannot see the whole picture.
These are my thoughts, and in no way am I saying that I’m right.

I have never heard such unadulterated bull faeces in all my life. I mean, sure, you are entitled to your views but seriously, take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if you seriously believe this.

Any argument, any point of debate, should always be looked at from the merits of the argument – not at the person making the point. As the old cliche goes “you play the ball and not the player”.

Trigger warnings are not required – indeed most research shows that they are harmful as people need some mild reminders of trauma in order to get over it.

Privilege is entirely irrelevant as everybody is privileged in some manner. Should I argue that we can safely ignore your arguments as you are privileged due to having a higher degree of education than most people in the world? Your arguments are only relevant if you are an illiterate garbage picker from the slums of an Indian city? Of course not – even though you are privileged merely from the luck of having been brought up in one of the richest societies that has ever existed your opinion still counts.

Ethiopia- Please re-read the article, and then read your response. You are completely missing the entire point. You may be too young to comprehend the point Haidt is trying to make, but he is trying to say everyone’s opinion/views matter and we can’t put people down just because their views differ from your own, yet here you are diminishing all of Haidt’s points because he “comes from privilege”. His presentation had nothing to do with privilege. And I don’t think you understand the word trigger in this scenario… He was trying to say that we can’t live life walking on eggshells just in case something we say might “trigger” a negative reaction in someone else. He never said that rape wasn’t bad. I was there, I am also a student at Centerville. Your question to Haidt was completely unfounded and you cannot try to justify it by the argument your making, because it simply doesn’t make sense. Nothing Haidt said indicated he thought rape was OK.
Also… you are a student who attends an elite (expensive) private high school in a nice city. You are 100% ” privileged.

Ethiopia, how in the world do you consider yourself without privilege, if only by living in the US and going to such an expensive school.
Clearly your unprivileged upbringing has indeed left you bereft of common sense and unable to control your emotions when you hear ideas that do not fit your already rigid ideology. As already mentioned, you totally misunderstood Dr. Haidt’s point about trigger warnings. You very badly need a treatment of tiny exposures to opinions different from your own. Then slowly build up the exposures until you can actually participate in a robust exchange of ideas without resorting to extreme emotions.
You might see if you can contact the brave young woman, “First Hand,” who wrote just above you. She is a woman who can tell you something about being abused by “privileged” women such as you. Then perhaps someday you can be strong enough to actually hold some views out of step with your school’s pathetic ideology.

I never said I didn’t have any privilege.
I am a person of color and a girl. In this way, I am underprivileged. Jonathan Haidt proposed a new “set of rules” on how we discuss race and gender. Racism negatively affects me. Racism positively affects Haidt. Should he decide what can and can’t be said? Sexism negatively affects me. Some sexism positively affects Haidt. Should he decide how we talk about it?

Why should someone who hasn’t experienced my struggle make the rules on how we discuss it?

Your problem is in thinking that there should be rules as to how to discuss something; and that somebody should decide upon those rules. The rules that both parties should work to are the rules that have formed over many centuries as to debate:
1) everybody gets an equal say;
2) you debate the arguments and not the person;
3) you remain cordial at all times;
4) if you continue to disagree then that is OK.

your problem is thinking racism sexism positively affect haidt. racism and sexism are not zero sum games, and discounting opinions of white men who are not racist nor sexist is the exact problem. perhaps you should reframe your own thinking so you stop making racist and sexist generalizations when interacting with individuals.

Hey Sean, racism and sexism, and any other form of discrimination, do positively affect those who are not affected by it. Let’s say ten people are applying for a job. If they’ve all got an equal shot, they’ve each got a 10% chance of getting in. If you take half of them, and reduce the chances of them getting in by 10% (leaving them each at 9%), each member of the other, “unaffected” half now has an 11% chance of getting in, more than they did before. In any competition, someone being disadvantaged is an advantage to everyone else.
Secondly, and this applies to almost everyone else who’s replied to Ethiopia (James, Howardwaldow, Seriously?), you don’t know Ethiopia. You really don’t have the knowledge necessary to decide how much privilege she has.

Hey Sean, racism and sexism, and any other form of discrimination, do positively affect those who are not affected by it.

Are you going to tell me that Ethiopia, by virtue of her being a black female, will have a lower probability of being admitted to a given institute of higher education than a non-black male with similar grades and board scores?

If you do, I have a Bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

You really don’t have the knowledge necessary to decide how much privilege she has.

Correct. However, Ethiopia was the one who brought up the issue of “privilege.” Anyone who is a student at an exclusive private high school, by virtue of attending that school, is very privileged.

As a product of public institutions of education, I find it absurd for someone attending an exclusive private high school to claim that Person X’s opinion should be discounted because of the “privilege” that Person X has. That is what Ethiopia did with Professor Haidt.

Which shows me that using the “privilege” point to try to invalidate another person’s argument, as Ethiopia did with Professor Haidt, is absurd.

An argument is valid or invalid according to the logic and knowledge underlying that argument, not because of the demographics of the person making that argument.

In any event, I doubt very much that exclusive private schools admit many people whose parents are poorly educated and of the lower class. I am reminded of the son of a childhood friend, who when he was in 8th grade, decided that he didn’t want to end up going to State U, like his parents and me. He therefore applied to and was admitted to an exclusive boarding school. He is the son and grandson of professionals. He is also black. He has gone on to a successful career- his name readily pops up in Google and Amazon searches- so he clearly deserved to be admitted to that exclusive boarding school and to the exclusive university that is his alma mater.

One point about “privilege” and exclusive private high schools that can be forgotten is that exclusive private high schools tend to be much more demanding than public high schools. My friend’s son, though he attended highly rated public schools, said that the work load at his exclusive boarding school was a rude introduction- much more demanding than what he had from public education. Ethiopia may be “privileged” by virtue of attending an exclusive private high school, but she is probably also working her posterior off.

Jake K-
Actually if you read my post you would see that I am a student at Centerville. I DO know Ethiopia. We both attend an elite private school costing roughly 30k per year, with an excellent education. (it appears on most “top 10 United States Private School” lists. Is that enough privilege for ya?

Ethiopia, Thank you for responding. I AGREE with you, there is something uniquely significant about first hand experience. But my main opposition is to the restricting of free speech of people you disagree with, regardless of who has or hasn’t first hand experience, by emotional arguments that shut down genuine debate. I believe Prof. Haidt was suggesting “rules” that restrict emotional outbursts, intimidation, and bullying within civil discourse. If the majority, which you clearly are a part of at your school, restricts the rights of the minority, this is bullying. You will become part of the majority again when you attend college. I believe Haidt, and many before him, has made the case that conservatives do not have the same “privilege” as left of center people in social psychology and most of college in general. To not understand how noxious this is for the minority is not a morally superior position, it is bigotry. The tragedy is you could be so much better than this.

Hey Ethiopia, it’s me, Jake. As far as I understand, Dr. Haidt wasn’t proposing a new set of rules of discussion. His talk, and more specifically the after-talk with the eggshells and polling, was designed to point out a problem in the way that we talk, and the way we perceive it. I remember seeing you at the after-talk, where everyone agreed that we want a place where discussion is open and free. You might have arrived after he asked the questions, but he was correct in saying everyone claimed to want an open academic environment, and that some people felt that it was not open. I believe his main point was just showing that there is a problem, that discussion is not equal. Now, when I raised my hand and said I sometimes feel like I’m walking on eggshells, that opinion came also from the fact that I don’t believe I am as informed as I should be on topics of race and gender. I often don’t want to share my opinion, because I believe I could be very wrong and don’t want to offend someone. I’m sure if I knew more about whatever topic was being discussed, and had a stronger argument, I would be much more comfortable discussing it. Several people above have argued with you about privilege, and I think I’ve found the point you’re arguing over. They’re claiming you said you didn’t have privilege, while you’ve said you did. I believe the misunderstanding came from the point at which you said “No matter how many articles, books, or journals you read you will never be able to fully understand the struggles of those of us who are not privileged,” which heavily implies that you yourself are not privileged. Based on what you said afterwards (“I didn’t say I didn’t have any privilege”) I think your earlier statement was misstated, which led to confusion and a bit of uncivilized behavior.

“I am a person of color and a girl. In this way, I am underprivileged.”

No you are not.

It is your personality, it is your health, your intelligence, appearance, beauty that makes more of your privilege.

A taciturn, non articulate white male is more or less privileged than you, if you are a black happy friendly girl that everyone likes to be with?

See i put more qualifiers for privilege: taciturn, dyslexic, happy, friendly.
I could list dozens. From intelligence, to emotion control, to physical capability, to health, well dressed to the body type etc etc.

Why you only allow race and sex?

Is it because you still don’t understand that race and sex are the most easy things to exploit and conditioning for political proposes since we Humans exist?

I hope you trust that I’m more sympathetic to your experience than some others who’ve reacted to you at the talk and here. I’m sincere about that.

I start that way because, in my disagreement with you here, you will lack a significant reinforcement of my sincerity: tone of voice, body language, and the simple give and take of words interspersed instead of the “taking turns” a forum like this forces upon us.

You cited context. It is even more critically important than you and many others may realize. A discussion is a progression along a path, not a series of stepping stones where one or the other needs to wait for others to catch up.

The key disagreement I have is the important difference between privilege and disadvantage. You may not see much difference, but in this context I believe it to be important.

I am a white male native-born citizen. Just knowing that gives you no context. I am two other things that inform this topic: first generation son of immigrants who arrived during the Cold War and spoke with heavy, Slavic accents, and the son of a Holocaust survivor. Assuming that I’ve paid close attention to my heritages — something not everyone like me has done — does give you some context.

I am other things as well, but my main point is to suggest to you that my entire life has given me absolutely no respect for how I feel about the disadvantages I’ve faced, that whatever privileges I may have received were in my view minimal, and for me there can be only one real solution to the disparities of power that cause privilege and disadvantage, and that’s discussion that leads to understanding and consensus.

It’s a very slow process. It leaves little room for feelings, and offers no consolation.

I could suggest to you that you are young and impatient, but I’m old (by comparison, ahem) and often find myself being impatient. I will suggest that you use the impatience instead of letting it use you. Your only “mistake” in speaking out to Mr. Haidt as you did was in letting your feelings phrase your words. If you’d tried to phrase it (briefly) like you phrased your first post, I believe the following discussion would have been very different there and here.

“You even gave the example that people often put trigger warnings in front of mentions of rape even though there was no scientific evidence that proved that people could be “re-triggered”. It was this point that pushed me into my emotions. I felt as if your comment diminished the experiences and feelings of those who have been traumatized and especially those who have experienced such a traumatizing violation like rape.”

The keyword here is “felt”. From you own account I already noticed that Haidt did not diminish anything. However, you started shouting because you “felt as if” his comments diminished the experiences of victims.

That is your colossal mistake. In a debate “feeling as if” someone said something is not valid because it isn’t what the man said, it is what you are afraid he silently means. But you can’t let silly fears play a role in a debate, which is meant to compare arguments, not to compare silly emotions. Therefore you should control your feelings. It is YOUR character flaw that you didn’t, and thus you made an enormous fool of yourself.

I was a 14-year-old female student at “Centerville” in 9th grade. It was an election year. When voicing my support for a conservative candidate, an aggressive classmate called me an idiot. Another called me a racist for not supporting Obama, even though my rationale centered on economic policies.

Teachers were openly and uniformly liberal (you could tell by the posters hanging in their rooms and the stickers on their cars). Their clear support of a single viewpoint seemed to fuel the righteousness that came at me from my fellow students. One student pulled me aside and said she worried I was being bullied and suggested I keep my views to myself. I didn’t want to (or couldn’t resist) and found myself in a constant state of conflict. After seeing a political sticker on my binder, a student in biology shoved my books to the ground and called me stupid. I don’t blame him – he was only 14 too. The climate at “Centerville” fueled his thinking. There were students with conservative views, but only the boldest spoke up.

As weeks went by, I grew depressed. The contrast was too great between this school and my family. At home, differing opinions were the norm and my own parents often openly and cheerfully disagreed on politics. It was more than I was equipped to handle.
Eventually I confided in an advisor about my stress. She was kind and acknowledged the hostile political environment at “Centerville”. Then, she too advised me to lay low as tempers might diffuse after the election. So much for encouraging everyone to share their own opinions.

In then end, I transferred out after 9th grade. Before I left, I penned a letter to the head of school about how I felt. I wrote that the school valued tolerance, but in my opinion, tolerance was extended only to approved opinions. Then I tucked the letter away in my desk where it still sits today. I had learned when to keep views to myself.

Hey First Hand,
I’m a current student of Centerville High and I am very sorry for the things you went through. I am shocked to hear that you went through these things so recently at a place like Centerville. Centerville, at least now, seems like a much more inclusive environment than it was when you attended, as I’ve never seen any of the bullying you described. I’m trying to remember seeing political posters in classrooms, but have found that the only ones I remember seeing in my time at Centerville have been very non-partisan, or from many decades ago (in history classrooms, where we learned about those elections). Which classrooms did you see these posters in, or which teachers posted them? Please only respond to this if you feel you can answer the question to me without revealing the identity of the teachers or school to the rest of the internet.

Jake K-
Remember just because it “seems” like an inclusive environment doesn’t mean that it is. It “seemed” like an inclusive environment when I attended a few years ago (and in many ways it was) but you may not notice the negative stigmas surrounding conservative views unless you are on the receiving end.
Just because you haven’t seen any incidents like the one’s I described doesn’t mean they don’t occur– I still have many friends that go to Centerville and have been told it still isn’t welcoming conservatives with open arms.

Blame women! How original! Maybe it’s worth considering how familiar a refrain this is in Western society. After that, try looking indward at how men have failed themselves instead of invoking it again. Who knows, you might even take responsibility for your actions one day!

Thank you for your sane comment! Haidt pulled the “gender” spin on this story out of his ass. As a student of the high school where he gave his talk, I can say that there were both men and women who supported him, and men and women who did not. To make the men into victims is a surefire way to get a bunch of men on your side, though!

It is of course impossible to reduce a complex social equilibrium-puncturing to a single dynamic, but there is a crucial premise at the bottom of victim culture that is insufficiently remarked-upon: it is that one’s self is essentially passive. One is just an observer, an experiencer, a paralyzed consciousness apparently without any ability to activate action. So everything is done *to* you. This is an essentially Decadent posture – that action is needless, that one need only experience. (The conservative extreme would be the flip side: that the self need not be permeable at all, that a hard wall is kept up and one marches on implacably.)

On the entire faculty, there was not a single teacher that was known to be conservative or Republican.

I’ll wager there are four or five. The thing is, manners and culture across the red-blue divide do differ systematically, as the purveyors of exit polls have discovered. We have one Facebook account in our house, and it does hit you how your prog friends just have to tell you their political fancies day in and day out. The known Republicans in our circle are taciturn. The thing is, almost no sensible arguments are offered. Bits of John Oliver comedy, strawmania, quips, insults, &c. Almost none of it was solicited explicitly or implicitly and almost none of it has a persuasive apercu incorporated therein. Thomas Sowell has offered that prog politics reflects the impulses and biases of articulate people. (Or, on Facebook, motormouths). Yep.

Not high school, but pre-K. Our child went to a grade school last year where they are taught the 150 year old nursery rhyme “Sticks and Stones” as follows:

“Sticks and Stones may break my bones, BUT WORDS CAN HURT ME TOO! Just say NO, turn and go to tell you and you and you (pointing to adults nearby)”

Despite my attempts to correct the error one day last year my son came home and said a kid hurt his friend at lunch. I asked if he was pushed, pinched, kicked, punched, what? He said, no, he hurt her, “In HERE,” (putting both fists on his heart). That was it, the discussion lasted for days after that and he now attends a school where Sticks and Stones is properly discussed!

After the Yale/Mizzu events I was tempted to take the articles to the principle and ask her (PhD BTW) if she was happy as this is what she has wrought!

So, no, not high school, far far far earlier — perhaps that is the real reason for the “universal pre-K” concept.

-Some of the writing on this topic is beginning to resemble the moral panic that is described in the “Coddling of the American Mind” article (catastrophizing, reading too much into anecdotal evidence, creating monsters to slay or denigrate). It might be counterproductive to turn this into a tribal opposition as in StrengthenU vs CoddleU

-adherence to inchoate ideology in youth isn’t a new phenomenon. When I was in high school I was punk, which on the surface seemed about the individual rights to celebrate difference, defend the downtrodden, but what it really was about for many was feeling special, that there is something very fundamentally wrong in the world, that most other people are sheep that need to wake up. The joke now is that being punk is about being an individual like everyone else (while worshiping at the altar of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, etc) as it was completely coopted into mainstream culture. This oppression/victim culture is pretty much the mainstreaming of the next wave that followed which agitates for many similar causes like anti racism, environmentalism, corporate control etc.

-the attempt to trace the intellectual background to thinkers like Marcuse and more broadly postmodern and marxist theories is interesting but I wonder if there was an indirect, unintended effect or echo of the 90s “science wars”. With postmodernism losing that debate the casual relativism about the status of moral and political positions that most students held has given way to forms of moral realism that perhaps feed a degree of certainty and righteousness that didn’t exist ten years ago. We could suppose that we used to have values that support open society and free debate, that those values are under attack but an alternative is that there was never a great allegiance to those values in the public consciousness, that the relativism that started to fade as anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science became ascendant in explaining the nature of morality, was a buffer in the form of non judgemental attitude about sanctioning or suppressing alternate views

-flowing from the previous point, the focus on ideology may lead to unoptimal prescriptions about what to do. The “do you support rape” comment reminded me of a teacher when I was in high school who would turn every class into a debate about current events which led to several incidents of students having meltdowns and the teacher being fired (e.g. Women not having the right to drive in Saudi Arabia turned into a discussion of how terrible it is there which offended a female student from Saudi Arabia so much that she became hysterical). Political correctness inculcates an ideology where anything potentially offensive is suppressed but students, especially students in high school are unequipped to discuss topics that are emotionally or politically charged. I remember in the first week of philosophy 101 in first year university how clueless fellow students were in their understanding of basic concepts that it’s understandable why some topics are not breached in high school. Viewpoint diversity is a good principle but it runs into practical concerns in intellectual development

-There is a concept in cognitive behavioral therapy of gradual exposure to anxiety inducing situations but it goes hand in hand with learning basic critical thinking skills to overcome maladaptive behaviors. Perhaps young students aren’t on average ready for open debate of some topics. The failure seems to start with the course pedagogy which doesn’t sufficiently impart critical thinking skills, effective, persuasive writing, informal reasoning, intellectual values like the principle of charity, skepticism, uncertainty. I was very bothered by the wrongness of opposing views (to some extent a lack of sophistication in interpreting them), and overly confident of the rightness my own point of view until university through courses like effective writing (mandated writing course) and modes of reasoning (first year philosophy course about informal reasoning). I remember a turning point in my thinking writing an assignment about an op ed about a newspaper publisher controlling editorial content of local newspapers (framed as corporate control imposing its biases and interests on a national audience) which was intended to draw out discussion of why it’s important to have diversity of view points, that there isn’t an opinion that isn’t biased. It’s easy to see bias and negative consequences in the villains we’ve created to be the other while defending underhanded tactics that preserve the sanctity of what we believe (hence platitudes like “free speech should have consequences” which justify silencing dissenting views not unlike the newspaper publisher in the aforementioned article)

-poking holes in statistics that support a radical point of view seems likely to make adherents overly defensive. I wonder if a better approach is to present a more comprehensive alternative that doesn’t mock those preciously held beliefs. Questioning the 1 in 5 rape myth or systematic oppression is like telling a person with body dysmorphic disorder that they look fine and shouldn’t be worried about what other people think. Patients with BDD will become very defensive and likely to quit treatment if their concerns are discounted. I think it was apt to invoke cbt in that article because victim ideology has a lot in common with disorders like bdd but I think Professor Haidt should think more about how to approach “treatment”. One of the tricks in cbt is it’s teaching and making habitual basic critical thinking that could apply to anything, which makes it less of a threat to core beliefs. When you give people the tools there is a process to work through which can sometimes take years. We can see why StrengthenU is preferable to CoddleU because we’ve already went on that journey

-one of the reasons diversity of viewpoint seems to suffer is ignorance of the history of ideas. For most students learning history it is a succession of dark events motivated by dangerous ideas that must be guarded against. It’s not surprising that intellectual diversity is discounted when the only narrative is a overcoming injustices and whiggish interpretation of progress. Popular political philosophies would probably become more sophisticated if kids were even aware that these discussions are not new.

I wish to applaud the “Centerville” students who posted here, regardless of their choice to post with their actual names (that’s mine on this post). I have a suggestion for you to think about and possibly discuss amongst yourselves.

We can all agree, I hope, that bullying in its many forms — Mr. Haidt was focused mainly on intimidation — is destructive at best. Consider the bare fact that this behavior, stemming from a power disparity between people being abused by those in power, is ubiquitous in our social and political history.

The question I pose is this: how can you justify this behavior under any circumstances? Do those who were the targets of bullying, once they come to a position of power themselves, have just cause to treat their the former bullies the same way?

This is only superficially about two wrongs not making a right. We are seeing this exact scenario playing out right now and not just on college campuses.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, I would certainly agree on your opinion of bullying. I am not sure if your questions about bullying reflect the “intimidation” of males that Jonathan Haidts’ article mentioned, but if it is, I have a few thoughts on it. First off, while I go to Centerville High, there are a lot of differing opinions about his talk, and mine isn’t shared by everyone. I have read Mr. Haidt’s Atlantic article, and it brought up some very good points about higher education and whether students were too coddled. But I think there is a difference between being bullied and becoming more aware. You ask about a cycle of bullies and the oppressed, switching sides. But maybe when we consider issues in that light, we miss the point. If I try to think of policies of oppression from the past, they’d probably come up as policies benefiting white, straight, males. I’m not saying males were all bullies, but the right to vote, hold jobs, marry whom you want…the list could go on. Now things, gratefully, are much better in the U.S., but we definitely could still be making progress. Society is still set up to advantage straight white males-not as blatantly, but it is easier to notice when the inequality affects you. So does this measure at all to the uncomfortable feeling people with privilege (who unconsciously receive those societal benefits) feel when they start realizing how that might make their answers be offensive to another? It is good that we can start recognizing this, but its also good to feel a bit awkward sometimes–that means we are learning! Jonathan Haidt’s Strengthen U professors should agree that having our viewpoints challenged is good for our growth. It isn’t acceptable to shut down others opinions, and if that is happening, we can fix it, however, I don’t think this is an example of cycles of bullying. If this is our next biggest complaint (not that I think it is, especially with all of the news recently about racial conflicts) I would say we are moving in the right direction.

Yours is the sort of thoughtful — and thought-provoking — expression that I sought with my question. I don’t mean to control the discussion with my question, but to contribute to the discussion itself.

I don’t mean to be patronizing, just expressing my own experience: I taught my children (now all adults) to question first and listen second, even and especially when the answer is not to their liking. It is simple to state, and very complex to apply, but the key concept is this: understanding is not agreement.

Suppression of ideas and the attitudes behind that act are driven by fear. I believe that the fear is based on a terrible lie, that coming to understand a thing is the same as agreeing with it.

I wish you and your peers the very best in life, knowledge and understanding. Your school’s primary task is to arm you with the skills and ego-strength to make choices about life, knowledge and understanding. That task, I sadly observe, is not being met if someone like Mr. Haidt is able to elicit the responses you saw.

Inequality is you having 20 years old in the year 2015 and another person being 60 years old.
Privileged is being healthy.
Privileged is you living with work and discoveries that many racists, sexists and whites males in the Past build, created, invented.
Privilege is you being in school, invented, created paid by others, roads invented, created, paid by others, technology created, invented, paid by others, energy discovered invented, created, paid by others. The food revolution that puts the food in your table. Created by White men. Repeat White men.

Privilege is you having access to technology, music, art that you didn’t contributed anything to. It was done 50, 100, 200, 300 , 500 , 1000’s many more years ago.

Privilege is you having access to technology today that a billionaire didn’t had 10 years ago. Nothing like this happened in human history in the past. Do to free market.

Difference, inequality is what makes us go to different places and have different ideas.
Freedom is Inequality.
Freedom is what creates.

In Equality there is no Freedom.

Most thing you use, most of comfort in your live were invented by whites males.
Unfortunately including the Marxisms you talk and don’t even realize.

And finally you are so privileged by being a racist, a sexist compartmentalized in your vision and not being called for it.
And finally a Fascist.
Your split of persons in races and genre are nothing more than another kind of corporatism.
In Mussolini’s Rome the parliament was split in industrials, trades, workers…

To the eggshell survey, please consider including a section where people can talk about their willingness to criticize their peers’ or teachers’ research. Specifically, their willingness to anonymously report if someone falsifies data, as well as their willingness to anonymously report misleading manipulation of data.

So Haidt’s suggesting a quota system for school staff hiring? Just as studies have established that women are less disposed towards stem careers, studies have shown that conservatives are less open to new experiences and ideas–the very essence of most academic work. So it’s not really surprising that they’re underrepresented in the academy. I’m sensing a basic contradiction in Haidt’s politically motivated position. He also seems to be gripped by the false equivalency fallacy. That leads to the notion that the most rabidly racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, or homophobic students need to be given a safe space where their views can be expressed and validated.

That is the truly dangerous bit about restricting freedom. Either everyone is free to speak or you have a privileged class that decides who is allowed to speak.

You presumably have read some study and interpreted it to mean that it is not surprising that conservatives are underrepresented in [academia] because they are “less open to new experiences and ideas”. Academia is where a lot of new ideas are born but the majority of what Academia teaches is repetition of what the previous generation taught. So yes, it is still surprising that conservatives are so underrepresented despite being averse to change.

You are essentially implying that education leans to the left because truth is left leaning. This is an incredibly offensive thing to think and write in a public forum that the whole world has to be exposed to. I for one think that you should remove your comment to preserve the safe space.

No, I dont really think any of that. Because it would be ridiculous for me to think that being offended is a reason to bully someone into censoring themselves.

You do not have the right to live a life without being offended. Your comfort is not a right. Your right is to live a creative life, think independently, and speak freely.

3. Most importantly, I am disturbed at one point where suggests that people are either “conservative or Republican” or leftist. First, the Democratic party cannot be called “leftist” by any stretch of the imagination. The Democratic party simple represents a difference portion of U.S. business than GOP. GOP has more social conservatives but no one in GOP is going to turn their back on business to do the right thing unless it seems like their cover is going to be blown. It is more fair to say that GOP is largely fiscal conservatives high-jacked by social conservatives and religious types. Democratic party can only be considered “left” in relation to GOP, disregarding international political leanings and the overall spectrum of political thought.

Just as studies have established that women are less disposed towards stem careers, studies have shown that conservatives are less open to new experiences and ideas–the very essence of most academic work. So it’s not really surprising that they’re underrepresented in the academy.

Thanks for replying to a complaint that was never offered. Variation from one occupation to another is unremarkable. A complete absence of one set of preferences is remarkable.

“studies have shown that conservatives are less open to new experiences and ideas”

In war and business you have new experiences and ideas every day. And suffer the results. Conservatives volunteer to military and business much more then progressives. Strange.

In ivory tower of academy you are protected and can build a cabal of bureaucracy if go to any department top.
Those in military have a much more progressive nature.
After all the winds of world and business are always changing.
And the results are uncertain.
Not in academy, if you go with flow and repeat what others are repeating in your own flavor for you to appear intelligent.

I think the labels each conservatives a progressives attach to themselves are quite wrong in this case…

he’s not suggesting a quota, but if you haven’t noticed, many of america’s college students are literally demanding racial quotas be implemented in their faculty. there is no false equivalency, unless you are claiming that rank and file academic leftism is a uniquely valid position in all possible facets of thinking.

All the points are extremely well taken, but it seems like a case of pointing the sawdust in someone else’s eye while ignoring the plank in your own.

There’s an awful lot of crazy on the conservative side…religious crazy, libertarian crazy, racist anti-Obama crazy. Even when the left culture war goes off the rails, which is often, it doesn’t hold much of a candle to those guys.

If you want viewpoint diversity, you have to offer a viewpoint that has a place in 21st century reason-based discourse…hard for someone to teach at an elite school and identify as supporting a party with creation scientists, anti-government tea partiers, and transparent racists. If you think there’s leftist groupthink, you haven’t seen ditto-heads.

The polarization today is kind of nuts, both sides need to recognize legitimate concerns on the other side, and not manufacture and nurture extreme and unwarranted levels of grievance.

P.S. your algorithm doesn’t think I’m human, which is some kind of metaphor for other-ing anyone who doesn’t agree with you LOL

I wonder if the problem really originates in high schools, as Haidt suggests, or if high schools are just responding to what they think colleges demand.

Does anyone know of any secondary schools that stand up to this regime of ‘repressive tolerance’? Or do they just go along with it because they want and need their students to be accepted by good colleges, and this is part of the package?

I graduated from a Massachusetts prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon, 50 years ago. The curriculum and the ethos have changed dramatically since then. It no longer seems to stand for anything of its own choosing. The teaching seems to be just a pale reflection of what is taught in colleges. After all, the parents want the kids to get into Yale, so the school is expected to serve up kids who will be compliant Yalies — whatever that takes.

If anyone can point to a secondary school that offers real liberal education and stands against the regime of Marcuse and all its trappings, let’s look at look at how its graduates do with Ivy League recruiters.

And, if anyone is looking for colleges that don’t enforce that regime, start with St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.

I am an English teacher at an arts high school. Recently I was teaching the research process and I was called a. “F***ing racist” because I dared question a student’s claim that there is a backlash against Muslims in the U.S. The school, so far, has supported the child’s right to free speech and encouraged me to dialogue with her.

Spot on article in that it chillingly illustrates the problem inherent in our school system. Thanks for sharing.

Of course, what it also illustrates is problem noted in the “who watches the watchers”-type of question. In this case, if the Yalies are created by “elite” high schoolers, then who or what is creating the “elite” high schoolers?

Prof Haidt, Thank you for all that you try to do. As a conservative who has spent a great deal of my adult time on campuses, I became sensitized to the intolerance a long time ago. I have been deeply involved in trying to reverse it for many years. Three and a half years ago I came to realize academia, as it is currently constituted, cannot be reformed. The leftist groupthink runs right up to the very top of the org chart. There simply is NO authority on campus who is willing to take on this problem. There are simply not enough top executives in education who support reform, and have the courage to fight for it. You will find this out in due time. After you know the power of those opposing you, you will be in a position to think more creatively about solutions. True innovative thinking is required, what we in the entreprenuerial world call creative destruction. I now believe academia is so corrupt that it will eventually implode just as the Soviet Union did, despite all of its perceived current power. New forms of more powerful learning vehicles are emerging, and with any luck they will be a response to the ridiculously expensive indoctrination centers that exist today. Hopefully, we will then be done with the poison of this very regressive and oppressive ideology.

Fr. Paul Shaughnessy, SJ coined the term ‘sociologically corrupt’, which is to say that the institution is incapable of reforming itself with its own resources and outside intervention is necessary. The trustees might repair matters, but they do nothing. The state legislatures might address the situation at the state colleges &c, but they do nothing.

The world is a better place with Dr. Haidt and Heterodox Academy in it. Speaking truth to power is particularly effective when the truth comes from within the very community that most needs to hear it.

And thanks so much for many of the comments here that help to illustrate and expand upon his points, especially the comments from students at “Centerville High.”

That said, I think Dr. Haidt and Heterodox Academy still have a good distance to go before they walk this argument all the way to it’s logical end. The problem starts long before high school, so waiting until then to address it seems to me to be closing the barn door after the horse is gone. And some of Dr. Haidt’s recommendations seem to me to address symptoms rather than root causes.

I can say with confidence and without hyperbole that Dr. Haidt knows he is a hero of mine. And conversely, I know he knows my thinking well enough and he knows me personally well enough to know that I come to my ideas honestly and with only the best of intentions, and that to the best of my abilities I strive to achieve and maintain a high level of intellectual rigor and integrity.

And so I’ll dispense with the three thousand word essay to Dr. Haidt and the rest of Heterodox Academy in which I attempt to build my case one logical brick at a time. Besides, I don’t think I need to lay out for all of you the argument that’s made by your own research and findings. I’ll cut to the chase:

Middle schools prepare our children for high school in the same way high school prepares them for college. And likewise, elementary schools prepare them for middle schools.

They teach through the prism of a single moral matrix, and in this way they deprive our children of an empirically, scientifically, and historically complete, accurate, rounded, grounded, and fair-minded understanding of the human condition. And in so doing they deny our children the full suite of social and intellectual tools that could help them navigate in the ultra-social societies we humans create for ourselves and to maximize their success and happiness within them. They fail at precisely that which they are supposed to achieve.

The lack of intellectual diversity in the education community harms education itself, and the children who receive that education, in the same way it harms the social sciences. It stifles, rather than encourages, critical thought, and it imparts an understanding of human nature that could generously be called partial at best, but is in reality arguably counter factual both from the social science perspective and from the perspective of history.

In this way the current education system exacerbates rather than ameliorates the Coming Apart, and the demonization and vilification that flows back and forth across the political aisle. It harms, rather than helps, our childrens’ understanding of themselves and of people who see the world differently from the way they do. It harms even their ABILITY to understand. It blinkers rather than widens their social vision. It hinders rather than helps their ability to make sense of the social world we humans create for ourselves, and their ability to navigate successfully within it. It narrows rather than expands their empathy and compassion for others. It is exclusive, rather than inclusive, of the ideas, values, virtues, and people who happen to be predisposed to lean toward other moral matrices.

If there were such a thing as a Hippocratic Oath for educators in which they promise to first do no harm, and to be fair, and honest, and to present ALL the evidence, and to follow that evidence to wherever it leads, then the education system as we currently know it would be in violation of that oath.

If we truly do care about our children and their future, and that of society; if we truly do wish to nurture our children and teach them and help them grow and to prepare them for life in the social world; if we truly do want to be fair, and honest, and reason-based, and evidence-based, and science-based, then for as long as we allow their education to continue through the prism of a single moral matrix as it currently does we fail as parents and as educators. And badly so.

Dr. Haidt’s recommendations are great, as far as they go, but as I said earlier, waiting until our kids are in high school amounts to closing the barn door after the horse is gone. And seeking out non-leftist faculty, and explicitly including viewpoint diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination are fantastic ideas that I wholeheartedly endorse, but they address visible symptoms rather than root causes. If we really are serious about fixing this problem then we have to address it where it starts rather than wait for it to fully bloom and then merely prune it.

So here’s my challenge to anyone and everyone in the education system from kindergarten through grad school who cares about our kids, and who values empathy, and tolerance, and inclusiveness, and real diversity, and real education:

Learn the lessons of The Righteous Mind, and incorporate them into your lesson plans. Help our kids to understand that intuition leads reasoning in every sense of the word “leads.” Help them to know there’s more to morality than care and fairness, and what that “more” is, and the values and virtues that flow from it. Allow them to see that even as morality helps us to form into cohesive groups through which we can accomplish that which we could not accomplish alone, it can also simultaneously blind us to the insights a matrix other than our own might yield. Let them see that everybody has the best interests of society and the individuals within it at heart; and that people who think differently are in fact not stupid, or manipulated, or evil. Show them that the “absolute miracle,” in Dr. Haidt’s words, that is human society, is achieved through all the tools in the toolbox.

There will always be liberals and conservatives – the compulsion toward change and the compulsion toward the preservation of social capital – and the natural tension that exist between them.

But there’s no reason in the world, none, that that tension cannot start from a true, accurate and complete understanding of human nature rather than on the parial, one-eyed perspective the education community currently inculcates into our children. There’s no reason a mutual understanding of what really makes humans human cannot be the common ground upon which our political debates ensue.

Dear Independent Whig: You have been trying to get me to examine k-12 education for years now, and I must say you are right. I suspect that the vindictiveness and mob mentality only come in in high school, but you are surely right that the groundwork was laid well before 9th grade. Part of that groundwork is the idea that children are fragile, which is not entirely the schools’ fault — American parenting changed radically in the 1980s, as Lenore Skenazy shows in Free Range Kids. So i agree, the Yale problem really starts well before high school, and it may start at home. Thank you.

Jonathan- Thank you so much for this piece and for your fair mindedness. I teach in a public high school, and what you are describing is slowly but surely making its way into public education. Diversity councils, “equity training,” and white privilege workshops are becoming the core part of the curriculum. Teaching for social justice is becoming the dominant paradigm, and there is no room for teacher dissent. Many teachers will whisper their displeasure, but would never dare speak out.

One problem that I see is that in recent years, American conservatism has become increasingly associated with anti-intellectualism. This naturally going to weaken conservative participation in the academy, with bad outcomes. If fewer professors identify as Republican than in the past, it might be because the public faces of today’s Republicans are what Republicans of the past would have called “Birchers”.

That group tends to see the role of the university as limited to training men to be as profitable as possible to their employers and giving women a place to meet future high-earning husbands. To them, intellectual inquiry and debate are frivolous; the notion that there might be more than one correct answer to a question is threatening (with this fear emerging in a mirror-image form among the postmodern Left where the notion that some answers are more correct than others is considered threatening).

The absence of intellectual input from the Right leads, I think, to increasing anti-intellectual attitudes on the Left. Some of it is sort of “if you can’t beat them, join them” but more of it is probably that if you don’t have anyone you need to defend your ideas to, your ideas will tend to harden into dogma.

I’ll end on the note that an awful lot of what we think of as “sanity” is not so much the result of proper brain chemistry as it is the result of socially-mediated feedback. When people put themselves into an echo-chamber environment where they can’t be challenged, they can come up with some truly delusional notions. We all know of the mighty who fell once they started believing their own press; the echo chamber effect is believing your own press on steroids.

Your belief that conservatives are anti-intellectual is one liberals take on faith. Essentially it’s – you don’t agree with me so you are not thinking clearly, or are ignorant, or are stupid, or are uninformed, or whatever the preferred word is at the time. Many liberals in the universities and other leftist dominated areas refuse to listen to conservative ideas and information, going so far as to try to get them fired. Your idea of how conservatives think about role of the university is actually laughable – a place for women to meet future high earning husbands. I know many conservatives and that is not the way they think or believe. Note that it isn’t conservatives that refuse to allow liberal speakers on campus, or interrupt them again and again in order to shut the speech down so those who do want to hear it cannot. It is liberals who do not want to hear differences of thought and ideas. Not all liberals, but those who do seem to be the ones who grab the power, and others and those who do not rarely speak up. Conservatives hear it again and again everywhere we go. Many liberals shut conservative thought out as much as they are able to – and they have been quite successful. You have a very liberal stereotypical and bigoted view of conservatives, and it does not reflect well on you.

If fewer professors identify as Republican than in the past, it might be because the public faces of today’s Republicans are what Republicans of the past would have called “Birchers”.

One reason for fewer professors identifying as Republicans is that Democrat faculty members often have a bias against hiring Republicans. As Casey Stengel once said, you can look it up.

When it comes to education level, it is pretty much a wash. Exit polls show that high school dropouts tend Democrat. Voters whose most advanced degree is a Bachelor’s degree split about 50-50 Democrat-Republican. Master’s degree holders tend Democrat. I suspect that the Democrat advantage in Master’s degrees comes from those who get Master’s degrees in Education. About a third of Master degrees are granted in Education. Any warm body can get a Master’s degree in Education. A Master’s degree in Education indicates that one can sit in a classroom. It is no indication whatsoever of intellectual rigor or intellectual attainment. And most Master’s degree holders in Education are Democrats.

Most liberals I know or read have internalized straw-man ideas about conservatives that are, at best, out-of-date (Birchers? Girls seeking their MRS in college? How 1950’s!) and, at worst, bigoted stereotyping promulgated in the left-wing echo chamber that includes much of the mainstream media (troglodyte anti-science social cons in thrall to fundamentalist religions). This goes double for the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

I’m a liberal turned libertarian (and thanks Dr Haidt, for including us in your studies), so I try to read widely across the political spectrum.

I suggest you might try reading some of the intellectual discourse on the right available with a few clicks:
National Review Online (Buckley threw the Birchers out in the early 1960s before the Goldwater campaign). You might check out the blogs first.
The American Conservative
Claremont Review of Books
Commentary
California Patriot (student paper from Berkeley)
individual writers of conservative and intellectual bent:
Walter Russell Meade
Thomas Sowell
Victor Davis Hanson
Camille Paglia
Midge Decter

Your comments reflect a bigotry that seems to prevail in progressive circles. Rather than stereotype those who may. It agree with you, why not cite examples that you disagree with. Maybe if we listened to the other side we might find we are not so far apart. Insulting others may make you feel better; it certainly doesn’t move the discussion forward.

You’re right, the perception that liberals are more intellectual is everywhere. Liberals have successfully branded themselves as the thinking person’s group and liberals have successfully branded conservatives as the simple person’s group. Simultaneously, conservatives have successfully branded themselves as the masculine group and liberals as the group for wimps. I think there is a lot of truth to all four of those stereotypes. I used to think that the Left’s penchant for analysis and complex view of the world meant that the Left was smarter. Then I realized that the Left nowadays uses it’s collective intellect to explain away facts rather than explain them (especially if those facts are offensive or politically inconvenient). After the scandal in Rotherham, Britain involving Pakistani immigrant pimps trafficking underage White girls for sex, the correct response was to recognize that people from the third world usually don’t share Western values (particularly the West’s values pertaining to women, children, and rape) and that an immigration policy that imports massive amounts of people from the third world is dangerous. Following recognition of that fact, Britain should have adjusted its immigration policies accordingly (no more non-Westerners, and send as many immigrants home as you are legally able to). That is the correct response, the conservative response (or as the Left would say, the xenophobic and racist response) and of course, not the response that Britain took. They took the Left’s response. Namely, that an epidemic of Third world immigrant-on-child rape means that it’s time to examine systems of oppression, time to teach boys not to rape, and especially time to punish White people for “Islamaphobia.” In other words, it’s time to educate the masses about complex, interesting, ideas, even if they are retarded and don’t work. And then somehow, magically, that will stop children from being raped.

“Their parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and… there’s no other word for it, bullied into submission by the girls, with the blessing of the teachers.”

Our closest living evolutionary relatives are, along with chimpanzees, bonobos. Bonobo groups are dominated by the females, not because they are bigger/stronger than males, they arent. Its because they form alliances and gang up to bully males.

Also, we evolved to fear those things which killed our prehistoric ancestors with significant frequency. We naturally fear large predators like crocodiles, lions, and bears; venomous animals like snakes and spiders; heights; and male attackers. We can learn that other things – car accidents, for example – are dangerous and become afraid of them, but we dont naturally fear them. Our prehistoric ancestors had little to nothing to fear from females, and I think thats why people tend to only see males as a threat to be taken seriously and scoff at the idea of females unfairly dominating males. But of course its a different world now. Women can get a man fired, sued, thrown in jail, have his children taken from him.. and in many cases it just takes a few words. People need to wake up and realize that female power is a threat to be taken seriously in our modern world. Males are not devils and females are not angels – despite our evolutionarily programmed tendency to think they are.

As a student at Centerville High School who is willing to use their real name I would like to say first off how ashamed much of school is that that question was asked. The questioning of Jonathan Haidt when he came to speak during the main lecture was more reminiscent of a cross examination in a courtroom, rather than a questioning of ideas by curious students. The questions were malicious, designed to trip up Mr. Haidt and force him to apologize or backdown. (Something, to his credit, he did not do and handled with great poise) It is shameful that a guest of the school was treated in this way.

Addressing the point of “Taylor Swift,”I have most certainly been aggressively verbally confronted by classmates and teachers when I say an opinion that is not the norm, and I will note that it is not usually male classmates doing this. The issue is not that female students have a strong voice. All students should have a strong voice, it is essential to the learning process. The issue is when students use their voice to attack others in a harmful way and prevent a safe learning environment from forming. It is not an issue that points of view are challenged, and we agree on this, it is that they are attacked. The difference in our opinion is that in my experience, different opinions are attacked, and often.

As a conservative male the difference between when I express my opinions, and when a liberal does is stark. I do not have a problem with my beliefs being challenged, or even attacked. I in fact think that growing up constantly being challenged for my beliefs has made me a much better at defending them and not taking personal offense when they are challenged. The problem is that often only the conservative student, speak or opinion is challenged, while the liberal one is taken to be gospel. I would have no problem if everyones beliefs were challenged, but it is wrong that only mine, the conservative ones, are.

Hi Carter! It’s actually Courtenay, if you must know, however I don’t think your mentioning of your name gives any more credibility to your argument. I do believe that you have been aggressively confronted, however I believe the majority of those confrontations happen in instances where others have more of a stake in the conversation than you. By this I mean that the conversation is one concerning, for example, women. Lets say its a discussion on abortion. Obviously the women will have very strong opinions because it is concerning their own bodily rights, and if your comment or opinion compromises that in any way, they may understandably be verbally aggressive. In that instances, you are entitled to your own opinion, however it is marginally less valid than that of a woman who the issue actually affects. This could be expanded to many different marginalized groups–people of color, religious groups, etc. This is certainly not to say that you deserve to be harassed, merely an observation that if someone is getting really angry with you it may be because it is about an issue that affects them more than it affects you, and it is very important to them. I still believe that all opinions need to be listened to and respected, however it is not necessarily “bullying” or “harassment” to have a very strong opinion on an issue and confront someone about it.

Courtenay, fancy seeing you here. I actually do believe that lending ones name to an argument gives it more credibility because one is not just asserting something behind a mask, they are attaching their name to their point. It gives the individual involved more skin in the game, so to speak, and requires a higher degree of investment on their part. Writing anonymously is one thing, attaching your credibility to an argument is another. (It lends the argument a fair amount of Ethos) But this is aside from the point.

It is interesting that you should bring up the issue of abortion because it could be very easily argued that the issue of abortion is not one of “women’s rights” but one of the “sanctity of human life.” Abortion is obviously a very difficult issue to talk about as even the basic premise of where to begin the argument often requires the acceptance of the opposition’s side.

For instance, is this a “women’s rights” issue or a “sanctity of human life.” Does life “begin at conception” or after “the viability of the fetus” as stated in RCW 9.02.110. Nonetheless, it is a deeply controversial and hot button topic for both sides. With one believing that the other hates women, and one believing the other side supports the murder of society’s most vulnerable, babies. Because of this, abortion absolutely can affect a man as much or more than a women depending on the situation of the individuals involved.

Nonetheless the issue is not having strong opinions on an issue or topic, but the way in which they are brought about. At “Centerville” they are systemically brought about in a negative and hostile way against conservatives and their view points. I agree with you that passionate debate can often be had without it resulting in bullying or harassment, however all to often this is not the case.

Regardless of one’s emotional convictions or otherwise an academic environment is an inappropriate environment to take out that frustration on a peer. Disagreeing with someone is not an excuse to be unkind or a bully. Allowing such behavior on the basis of “emotional distress” or dislike of someone or their opinions is not only wrong but sets an incredibly bad precedent that ones actions are justified because they believe them to be. Just because someone is offended or feels something does not mean they are right.

You think that women are the only people who have an interest in survival of the race? And apparently also you think that men have to pay child support without question but also have no say in what happens to the child.

She said “Obviously the women will have very strong opinions because it is concerning their own bodily rights, and if your comment or opinion compromises that in any way, they may understandably be verbally aggressive.”

This implies that men have no business having an opinion on the issue — they have no interest in their children, otherwise known as “the survival of the race”. How else can I read “compromises it in any way”?

courtenay (sic), for the sake of america, i urge you to examine the belief that men do not have a place in discussing women’s issues such as abortion, especially considering it’s an issue that most, if not all, of your female classmates have zero first hand experience with.

Obviously the women will have very strong opinions because it is concerning their own bodily rights, and if your comment or opinion compromises that in any way, they may understandably be verbally aggressive.

You propose to hire a perverted gynecologist to dismember my child or soak it in caustic brine. I think I might have something to say about that sister.

Courtenay – the point is that, whilst the mother may be carrying the foetus, the foetus is both the father’s and the mother’s.

Abortion affects both people and both should have equal say over it.

And I say this as a classical liberal (in the progressive European sense, rather than the regressive American sense) who believes that the right to an abortion is something that should be available to all women.

Strange that Courtenay Roche don’t think asking the female or male children matters about their end. For us to kill there most be a strong reason. Not just of convenience.

“however it is marginally less valid than that of a woman who the issue actually affects.”

So a men that contributed with his sperm to create a child that is in the mother belly is not affected by his or her existence. There are no emotions , no feelings, no hope, no imagination how the children will be, the games the father thinks that will play with her or him, that does not exist. It does not “actually affect” him.

Corollary: so you defend that a father have no responsibility to support a children/mother in the pregnancy?

Oh my god you guys are all over exaggerating grossly just to prove some silly point on the internet. You are being facetious, of course you understand what I mean. The male’s opinion on a woman’s BODY is marginally less valid–not her baby, which she most likely doesn’t want anyway–her BODY, which will be put through 9 months of pain. It’s not about whether or not men have a say in raising a child–of course they do. If you are raising a child with a man, he should have equal say in everything. However, in this case, the woman does not want to raise a child, the question is about whether or not to put her through 9 months of childbearing to birth a child that she will then give up for adoption, most likely. To force her to have a child she doesn’t want. Even if the father wants the baby, the decision leans more on the mother who will have to carry the child. So maybe I am a “Marxist” and our generation is “doomed,” but tell me, Humbug, Blo, and LL: I don’t know if you are women or not, but if you were a man, don’t you think it would be a little out of your place for you to tell a woman that she should not have the right to do what she will with her body? No, you do not have that right. You can have that opinion, but you cannot force it onto somebody else and not expect them to be angry about it.

With respect; abortion is as much about public policy as it is about personal decisions. Groups supportive of abortion rights have done a good job (politically speaking) by framing the argument in terms of personal choices. The ability to create life is not limited to women and the choice to end life impacts all of society. While we may disagree about abortion, both men and women bring a perspective to the argue why that should be encouraged. The only way we will figure out the best outcome is by having an open debate. Again; I don’t know what the correct solution is but we should all seem to listen.

That is very sad. The approach that the law (especially the family courts) has towards men and women; namely, “man bad, woman good.” More specifically, in any dispute, the man is the oppressor and the woman is the victim. You are right that this faulty worldview does a lot more damage out in the real world than in college and high school.

I fully agreed until the “actively seek out non-leftist” pitch. Right or left, a good school values solid criticism and eschews political litmus testing. Of course, the failures are everywhere and there are hardly enough honest critics to go around, which brings us back to the present problem. But aiming higher with the remedy strengthens the argument.

Right or left, a good school values solid criticism and eschews political litmus testing.

No, schools which have an architectonic mission must test. What’s grossly amusing is the sheer mediocrity which has ensconced itself in the school on which Dr. Haidt reports. They cannot admit to themselves or their clientele just what their architectonic mission is, in part because they fancy their sectarian opinions are knowledge itself.

Actually, this is a case study supporting the thesis that swank private schooling just is never worth the dough. Find a place you can afford in a bourgeois suburb and monitor your child’s course work (making sure he takes the bloody AP courses on offer). Either that or homeschool. The Catholic schools are distinct from generic private schools only in their history and sales pitch, so should generally be avoided.

I am a student at “Centerville High School” so I feel qualified to counter a few of Jonathan Haidt’s points. His assertion that the questioning was “the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had.” was not untrue. Many of the people asking questions barely even listened long enough to hear his response, only wanting to attack Haidt and somehow feel superior. The question, “so you think rape is ok?” was completely unfounded, and most of the audience groaned at it. I consider myself to be very liberal, and I agree that discussion rather than aggression and attack is the best way to approach these issues. However, I think Haidt exaggerated the “oppression” that males, or more specifically conservative males, feel at Centerville. His words were “bullied into submission by the girls, with the blessing of the teachers.” Bullied. What needs to be addressed here is the fact that for years, many girls are unconfident in the classroom, and discussions, particularly in STEM classes, are dominated by their male counterparts. I’ve attended Centerville since Middle School and can honestly say that many of my female classmates only found their true voices Freshman, Sophomore, or even junior year. Now that females do have a stronger presence in the classroom, we are being labeled as “aggressive,” and even “bullies.” It’s important to note, also, that in the wider world, males have a stronger voice and stronger presence–in government, in the workforce, in the media, and even sometimes in the home. Girls need an environment where they feel comfortable sharing their opinions, no matter how strong. That is not to say that the boys should be silenced. I agree with Haidt that there needs to be real discussion, and for that to happen, everyone needs to be respectful and responsive to others’ viewpoints. I also believe, like Haidt, that to have your viewpoints challenged is critical to growth and change; consequently, I think it’s hypocritical of Haidt to say that boys or conservative students are being bullied because of their opinions, because their beliefs need to be challenged just as much as liberal beliefs. Not attacked, but challenged. I really loved having Haidt as a speaker because, though I didn’t agree with everything he said, its really important that Centerville, and high schools and colleges around the country, open up discussion of more viewpoints.

As a student of ‘centerville high school’ as well, I can assure you this comment is completely true. While multiple questions were phrased as attacks towards Haidt personally, many of them were completely rational. In response to one question (about his annoyance towards people who are pushing women to be in more stem positions) he stated a very vague position on how women, no matter their environmental conditions in childhood, are still predisposed to not be in stem positions (genetically).

This was not the only ‘sketchy’ point he made. The question about his condoning of rape, while completely unnecessary, was founded on his insensitivity towards the subject (which continued into many subjects, including race and gender).

His careful picking of data allowed his points to made clearly and succinctly in his mind. Questions that were too long or that had follow ups were completely ignored. In response to one of the first (albeit angry and unnecessary) questions, Haidt’s response was to tell the audience that in order to fully look at an argument, one had to look at both sides, something I (as someone who did believe in a large amount of what Haidt was saying) had to scoff at. His entire argument was founded on the idea that everyone being free to say whatever they want is the best thing possible for American schools, while being politically correct in all scenarios is the worst thing possible for American schools. Obviously there are positive and negative aspects to both. This completely contradicts his belief to look at both sides of an argument dispassionately, not to mention being hard, as students who do care about their education, to listen to.

Haidt’s talk was difficult to listen to. Even though I believe in almost all of his points (despite being part of many, although not all, of the minority groups mentioned) his inability to speak to us effectively (in a way that didn’t seem like he condoned rape) made it so that his argument was not relayed to us clearly. His blatant misunderstanding of his audience put him in the position to be attacked.

One can say that he did that on purpose, to prove his point about shaking those who do walk on eggshells. But that doesn’t work. Telling defensive people their wrong doesn’t work. Sorry.

Ok, did you even read my comment? I made one point about how the questions were hostile (and they were–body language, tone of voice, “so you think rape is ok?” which he obviously didn’t mean) I continued to disagree with him in many ways. I’m pretty sure I know who wrote this comment and I’m pretty sure I am a friend of yours and I must say that I am disappointed you neglected to actually understand what I was actually trying to convey. My first sentence was not my only point, and was in fact the least important thing I said.

“In response to one question (about his annoyance towards people who are pushing women to be in more stem positions) he stated a very vague position on how women, no matter their environmental conditions in childhood, are still predisposed to not be in stem positions (genetically).

This was not the only ‘sketchy’ point he made.”

You state this like it is an article of faith that women would be totally rad in STEM if only men would stop holding them back. What makes this “sketchy”? There is an abundance of evidence that men and women are different and think differently. There is almost no evidence that women will change that position based on upbringing. The balance of the evidence is that men’s and women’s intelligence is different. The only reason this is not accepted by now as an article of faith is political pushback such as what you are making. Oh, the irony.

Precisely. It’s a shame these girls are blind to their indoctrination. Of course, we should not discourage girls from engaging in STEM fields but the overwhelming evidence says they simply are less predisposed than boys to do so. As for insensitivity toward rape, having watched many of Haidt’s lectures, that is clearly not the case, and I would have to believe the students above were simply not accustomed to witnessing a discussion that touches the subject like they saw from Haidt. They can choose in their future to embrace openness to immediately offensive ideas, or retreat to radical coddling of today’s America.

“One can say that he did that on purpose, to prove his point about shaking those who do walk on eggshells. But that doesn’t work. Telling defensive people their wrong doesn’t work. Sorry.”

It’s interesting to hear you say that… by the same logic, telling privileged people that they are privileged should not work either. It seems to me that this entire discussion has an unnecessarily confrontational framing on both sides. I really wish more people would read the book *Nonviolent Communication* by Marshall Rosenberg. It has a ton of applicability to this discussion in my opinion.

I am not a student at your school, but I watched a youtube video of him giving the same talk at Yale. He was not being insensitive. You’re probably overly sensitive.

And why is his point about women in STEM “sketchy?” There are lots of studies that show that biological factors explain the STEM gap. According to Simon Baron-Cohen (Borat’s cousin), the director of Autism Research at Cambridge, male brains are hard-wired for systematizing and female brains are hard wired for empathizing. There are many interesting studies that back this idea up, none of which you will ever hear about in a college course because of political pressure. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/apr/17/research.highereducation

Thank you for these comments, Taylor.
I strongly support efforts to help and encourage women to speak up and be more assertive in areas traditionally dominated by men, including STEM and MBA programs. This is not about calling women aggressive for speaking up. My concern is the tactic used by “Marcusians”, as I described them in my talk, of discrediting one’s opponent by linking them to racism or sexism. This is not speaking up. This is a dirty trick — a bad ad hominem attack. And this is what the boys seemed to fear — that if they speak up they will be attacked morally, they will be said to be bad people. By all means, challenge the boys if they say something you disagree with. But don’t imply that they are bad people for saying what they say.

lol. more of your seemingly terminal confusion and nonsense. teaching at a catholic highschool does not necessitate becoming indoctrinated by its “anthropology.” and sexism has a very real meaning and sense, although sexists, often right-wing, are in chronic denial.

Fast labeling instead of knowing a person on a deeper level is not the best idea. Nowadays the younger generation is taught to be part of the witch-hunting. We are all much more complex than to be labeled based on 1-2 sentences. Plus those who are a bit paranoid on the topic of race/gender/social status, etc., are much more likely to see racists and sexists.

You didn’t denied the author assertion. He presented
evidence of it. From the silent boys to other details.

Your contest of his opinion was a non answer. You didn’t presented evidence that could challenge his opinion.
From outside your school seems an extreme sexist school. One side the boys in the other the girls.

Your logic also fails in simplest things: “His assertion that the questioning was “the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had.” was not untrue.”

How do you know it was “not untrue”? have you have been present in all the author questionings in all his life to know if it was or not the most hostile?
You have to be precise with language, if you wanted to say that you agreed that the author had an hostile encounter then you quote only the relevant part.

Do you feel uncomfortable? if you feel then another fact is that you can’t tolerate strong opinions.

When I said the questioning was hostile, I was simply agreeing with what he had already said. No, I have not been to all of his other talks, and perhaps “the most unremittingly hostile I’ve ever seen” was an exaggeration, but I concur that it was hostile. No need to attack petty details of my comment simply because you can’t find anything else to respond to. He presented “evidence” from talking with a few parents. I GO TO THE SCHOOL. I attend classes. I am present when these boys are being “bullied into submission.” Let me tell you, that is a gross exaggeration.

My evidence is that I have never seen any boy be attacked by a girl in class for any of his comments. I have seen boys’ opinions being questioned, but never in an overly hostile way. I confess that I don’t have evidence as to whether or not boys (or anyone) has ever felt afraid to speak out, but judging by the lively, varied discussions and debates I have in class everyday with a diversity of opinions, I think I have sufficient evidence to the contrary.

During these lively discussions, people may feel the need to tread carefully, but only in the sense that they do not want to say something unintentionally inflammatory or rude. In the instances where people have said something to offend someone–and not very many people are ever offended–they simply correct themselves. Some people may see it as “over the top” or even “liberal brainwashing” but I see no harm in correcting or explaining yourself to someone who feels offended by a comment you make. If someone feels offended, that is a valid response. It is more about their offense than how much you meant it, and don’t take it to heart if you have to explain to them what you meant to negate the offense. It’s not that hard to have a civil discussion, and I feel very privileged to go to a school where I can have discussions and debates that are both lively and civil.

This is a very important piece. I think you should publish this where it has a wider and more varied audience.

Two things strike me as subtle in the details. One is the mechanism by which this chilling effect works. It appears to be via smearing and exaggerated labeling using key negative words, often in a passive aggressive manner. You experienced this when the girl asked if you supported rape. The way you describe it feels exactly like an accusation, a label, a smear. I wonder if this is a product of hashtag social networks. We see it common elsewhere nowadays, including Christina Hoff Sommers labeled a rape denialist/apologist with her talk on feminism being called “violence”, with Sam Harris regularly misquoted with clear goals to smear him, the use of one-sided unfalsifiable claims of harassment used to label GamerGate as misogynistic, and even Tim Hunt. This kind of reactionary, defamatory bullying seems to be successful enough that it is being used regularly to scare dissenters from speaking up.

Of course it is nothing new as a tactic, but I wonder what caused it to become so predominant so quickly. I suspect social networking like Twitter plays a big part in it, particularly given the limited 140 characters that don’t allow for clarity, but allow gangs to form easily via hashtags and following a few leaders.

I’m also interested in why so many administrations are failing to stand up to this clear mob bullying behaviour. They are acquiescing to the bullies and becoming bullied themselves. Mobs of students are bullying teachers and administrators, and nobody seems to be stopping it. I don’t understand why. It seems to be this idea that as long as a group can portray itself as being victims (the victim culture, as you say), that alone acts as a shield to allow them to behave terribly without consequences, leading to even more bad behaviour, like some sort of multicultural Lord of the Flies.

A second problem I see is the reversal of liberal principles by those on the far left, or rather the “progressive” left. Most of the people resisting them hail from the left and are espousing very liberal principles, like freedom of speech and treating everybody equally on merit. These activist groups treat people like stereotypes and attack when people step outside of that stereotype. They are dividing the world into groups and segregating them just as the old school racists and sexists did.

I don’t just mean they attack white males. Everybody is aware of that. I mean they portray women as frail, helpless, and without agency, needing safe spaces from controversial topics, complete with crayons, balloons, and videos of frolicking puppies. When other women stand up to this portrayal, they get attacked and smeared by these mob bullies.

They portray Muslims as a marginalized class who simply don’t have the capacity to act peacefully when subjected to cartoons of Mohammad. They’ll hold Westerners to high standards of peaceful tolerance, but Middle Easterners as if they are wild animals who just can’t possibly know any better. And when Muslims do stand against these violent acts and call them out, these far left “progressives” call them traitors to their kind, porch monkeys, and other slurs.

Further to the point, they apply the concept of cultural appropriation, making sure that races and cultures do not cross-pollinate. They suggest that whites should keep to white culture. The student union at the University of Ottawa (Canada) even just ended an annual free yoga class because yoga is cultural appropriation. Yoga. They are segregating us back into our racial and cultural purities.

Their policies are almost indistinguishable from old-school racial segregation and bigotry. They justify them differently, and appear to try to invert them, but they still try to push people into their racial and cultural cages, like we’re all zoo specimens.

My question is how did this happen. There are loads of generally left-of-center liberals fighting this: Sam Harris, Sarah Haider, Maajid Nawaz, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Bill Maher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Greg Lukianoff, Jerry Coyne, (borderline centrist) Christina Hoff Sommers, and yourself (I would say), among many others. I consider myself to be slightly left of center and I abhor this group of authoritarian leftists. So how is it that a sufficient portion of the left lost its liberal way and turn to illiberal, authoritarian, bully tactics? And why do they think of themselves as liberal when they clearly do not hold liberal principles in mind. They seem closer to classical conservative views — anti-sex, segregation, dress appropriately for your own cultural background, no off-colour jokes, no images of scantily clad women, and so forth.

It’ll certainly make for an interesting study on social behaviour and shifts. You might update your political analysis to include a fourth category here, much as you added libertarians to the right. Perhaps the political compass is a decent model, with authoritarians on the left (modern “progressives”) and right (religious, nationalistic) and liberty-orient left (liberals) and right (libertarians). Left here would mean a strong government of the people, and right would mean a weak/small government.

Ad–you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.
There is an existing political map that adds a second dimension of authoritarian-libertarian to the traditional left-right scale. It goes back to the Nolan map in 1969(!) and is continued by the Advocates for Self-Government. Their quiz is available online. https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/quiz.php.
You might also consider the implications of strong-weak vs large-small in your descriptions of government “of the people”. After a certain size (is 20-30% of the economy strong enough?) “of the people” becomes “by the administrative state and politicians”.

Re: “So how is it that a sufficient portion of the left lost its liberal way and turn to illiberal, authoritarian, bully tactics? And why do they think of themselves as liberal when they clearly do not hold liberal principles in mind.”

I would say that the left has become dominated by persons who believe that rights are malleable because they are a privilege defined and authorized by government or other persons in authority. It is the job of those elites to bring “progress” to our understanding of what are my rights vis-a-vis your rights.

This is in contrast to the belief that certain rights are inalienable and come from a creator. The right to have an opinion and to express it would seem to be envisioned by the U.S. Constitution as such a right, as expressed most clearly in the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech.

If at least certain rights are not inalienable, and if rights do not come from a creator, then where is the logical limit to what one human can decide is “progress”? Unfortunately one is not apparent to me.

I think you are misunderstanding the redefinition of rights favored by the progressive left. They tend to have a very fuzzy idea about the source of rights, and therefore tend to have an ever growing list of them. They do not view them as subject to arbitrary re-definition.

Instead they apply an unclear double-standard to the ways rights may be abridged to provide justice. For members of Victim classes the rights of Privileged classes may be violated in order to provide justice. Even if they were to agree with you on the origin and scope of rights, this point of contention would continue the ongoing war over access to “Victim Status” and therefore the power to justly violate the rights of others.

AD: “So how is it that a sufficient portion of the left lost its liberal way and turn to illiberal, authoritarian, bully tactics? And why do they think of themselves as liberal when they clearly do not hold liberal principles in mind.”

“Liberals” have always been authoritarian bullies. Liberals appropriated their non-de-guerre after the progressives got a bad name for their statist intentions. Progressives adopted the name as a cover up for their communism.

Until recently, Lefists have not felt they had enough power to consistently act on their antipathy for people who disagree with them. Now they are acting from their heart for a host of reasons not the least of which is that Obama (as role-model) is a left-wing authoritarian who eschews bi-partisanship (notice? how he constantly makes Republicans the bad guys and saves his enmity for those who do not agree with him rather than those entities [ISIS and Islam] that could pose an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western Civilization).

U.S. leftists control government, media, education, and even the digital domain. In other words, they control the infrastructure of 21st century life. It should not be unexpected that they would want to flex that muscle, and part of that continues to be to divide people based upon insipid criteria, because a divided people are easier to conquer.

Leftists do not understand that the instability on social mores makes people more conservative. Perhaps they will find out.

JS, I’m sorry to say that your very comment, to my eyes, seems to bear some traces of past deprivation from viewpoint diversity, in its assumption that “conservative” thinkers can’t be “cutting edge” or (particularly in today’s academic climate) “subversive.”

First, there is this notion that “[o]ne of the characteristics of the university system is that it tends to be cutting edge, pushing the envelope.” One of the best overviews of how this idea has gone awry is found in A. T. Kronman’s “Education’s End.” The crisis in our universities is, for the most part, a crisis in the humanities. The social sciences have been less wracked by internal discord because they are, in fact, the vanguard of the revolution. For the social sciences, being on “the cutting edge” ultimately means displacing the humanities (and for the best take on THAT phenomenon that I’ve read, see N. Postman’s “Technopoly”). The natural sciences have largely been left untroubled, although the treatment of Tim Hunt at UCL suggests that that may now be changing. If it does, it will have dire consequences, and serve as a grim comeuppance to all those technocrats who have declared the humanities “irrelevant” in the midst of this ongoing cultural revolution. Modern p.c. orthodoxy is in fact a rigidly conformist and inflexible (not to mention incomplete) cosmological system that, given free reign, would brutally cut off innovation and original thought.

As Kronman ably points out, applying the research model of the natural sciences to the humanities, by ordering that professors of the latter be constantly on “the cutting edge” (invariably achieved by “subverting” our shared cultural heritage), has played directly into the hands of those who would impose this stifling orthodoxy on the pursuit of knowledge as a whole. The humanities are actually best taught with a “traditional” focus, with a view to providing students with the core cultural and spiritual competencies from which new knowledge can grow… or, at the very least, by which the application of new knowledge (scientific, technological) can be sensibly restrained! The humanities simply do not advance in the same way as the natural sciences, and the endless stream of unread “deconstructive” articles churned out by the professorate does little more than (in Northrop Frye’s words) spin the Mandala wheel.

That isn’t to say that the humanities NEVER advance. But where, in the orthodox academy, is the answer to F. A. Hayek, to P. Rieff, to Charles Taylor, to Francis Fukuyama, even to Camille Paglia? What have the transhumanists, those übur-liberals, done with Teilhard de Chardin? Going into university from high school I was already vaguely aware of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc., and I still find many of these latter thinkers challenging and fascinating, but those in the first list each struck me with the full force of revelation because the orthodox academy (save for a few tenured professors in secretive advanced courses) has little use for them. In my view, the “cutting edge” SJWs currently mobbing U.S. campuses would commit these works to the bonfires of “progress” because they have simply lost the capacity to critique such “unorthodox” positions on their merits, rather than from some politicized pseudo-moral pedestal.

It’s astonishing. In the last good course that I ever took at university, our professor (who I suspect was in the “intellectual Catholic” camp, though he was very coy about it) gave his class a seemingly simple assignment: write an essay explaining why the Holocaust was wrong. Nearly everyone came back with an ECONOMIC argument. The whole language of Good and Evil, thousands of years of painstakingly developed human moral philosophy, was completely lost to these students. Religion? Forget about it: better to know nothing about the subject at all than to risk saying something “non-inclusive”. Now, I ask you: what on Earth is “cutting edge” about that?

I just replied to another reply of my comment that might address what you’re getting at, and I think we actually agree on the “cutting edge” issue more than was initially apparent…?

As for your comments on the “hard sciences”, you might be surprised how much the desire to be cutting edge affects their field as well. The competition to be first with the new novel technique often supersedes the need to ensure that the foundation built upon is solid! [That’s my opinion of the ecology field that I’m relatively familiar with, and which in my opinion is too quick to call itself a “hard” science to begin with!]

JS, I agree a great deal with what M. DeGroat wrote above. I was in college from ’65-’70, and involved again with universites in the last 15 years due to philanthropic interests. In my real life I ran my manufacturing company for 28 years and in recent years have started a cutting edge education company. I am simply amazed at the dearth of “progress” in the social sciences and humanities in the last 50 years. For that matter in the late 60s I witnessed the newly formed BSU take over the admin building of my college, holding administrators and secretaries hostage, much as they are doing today under the BLM movement. I actually believe the last 50 years of leftist domination of academia has rendered it worse by any objective measure. Some progress!
On the other hand in the relatively “conservative” world of business, I witness more cutting edge innovation in a month than I’ve seen in sociology in 50 years. Also, please stop insulting conservatives out of ignorance. A conservative and a traditionalist are two different species. I would strongly recommend you at least make friends with an actual conservative before you insult us again.

I was certainly not intending to insult conservatives, so my apology if it came across that way. In fact, the thrust of all my comments was that both traditional and progressive ways of thinking have their merits, but that perhaps the ideal ratio of one to the other differs across time and perhaps even in certain professions.

I agree with you about the contradiction between so called conservative business and the willingness to adopt new ideas. I mentioned those contradictions in another comment (I tried to differentiate progressive vs traditional ways of thinking, vs political positions and ideologies which are generally held by one side of the political spectrum of the other. These do indeed contradict often — so called progressives being very Luddite in their approach to technology, for instance — and it leads to a lot of confusion I think. I think the reality is that most of us across the political spectrum are more dogmatic and rigid in our beliefs than we like to think we are.

This is why my daughter is at a conservative Catholic HS where the views err towards the traditional rather than at a private prep school like you describe above (there are a few near us in south OC/CA that fit the mold described above that I wouldn’t send my daughter to at any price). Besides having better sports teams for both boys and girls :), the boys do not feel scared-and my daughter is being raised in a way that will give her the necessary defenses against the thought police that is surely coming when she gets to college…

Catholic school? The Catholic Church is itself the thought police. At Catholic schools teachers are not allowed to advocate or teach anything that goes against the teachings of the church. If they do, they face being fired. Catholic schools do not give students a balanced view of life.

That isn’t true at all. I went to Catholic schools for 8 of my 12 years, and believe it or not, we even learned about evolution. So I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I’d check it if I were you.

Evolution is accepted by the Catholic Church. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I taught at a Catholic HS for 20 years. You definitely had to walk on egg shells. A Latin teacher was fired because parents were outraged that she compared Mary to Isis and other archetypal mother goddesses. Students had to have their parents sign a waver before they could read the Color Purple for AP English. For AP Art History parents had to sign off that their children would be exposed to a lot of nudity and “mature” themes. And on it goes. As a non-Catholic I had to be constantly on guard about what I said. Definitely not heterodox.

You know, if a teacher of a Catholic school, says such nonsense about Mary – promoted by Dan Brown in Da Vinci code, he/she should look for other place to teach in. That is considered a heresy and the church is not promoting relativism.
Imagine a teacher in a madrasas telling students that Mohamed was not a prophet – blood would be spilled.

Not true; read some of the religious scholars teaching at Notre Dame and Georgetown for example. There is a long standing tradition of challenging Catholic teaching within Catholic institutions. The Jesuits have long tolerated dissent that “liberal” universities would never tolerate.

Even if your assertions were true, we shouldn’t tolerate illiberalism no mater where it occurs.

Sir, it’s not a mark in favor of Catholic universities that they readily employ people dedicated to undermining their foundational mission (see, for example, the treatment of Cdl. Arinze at Georgetown). In truth, what’s happened at both institutions is they ceased to be in service to the Church and turned into playpens for their faculty.

I’m pretty far on the left but I’ve gradually come to this mindset. The most recent protests have been utterly embarrassing, and dare I say they have a bit of a Maoist tint to them with the endless demands for apologies, show trials, and the general desire to police (the hell out of) culture.

I keep waiting for the final shoe to drop, the thing that’s just too much that nobody can defend. But we’ve already banned “Ovid” and the Christakis probably would’ve been removed as masters if it wasn’t for that video and the subsequent backlash.

I am a high school teacher and want to thank Dr. Haidt for drawing attention to what actually goes on in secondary ed., which has long been ignored by the academy. I never cease to be amazed that, except in a few small or elite high schools, the secondary classroom seems completely divorced from the lifeblood of discussion and ideas that I came to love in college. And the academy has largely seemed unconcerned about this rift, to be honest.

One objection: I think you are giving the game away by referring to a common respect of plural opinions as “viewpoint diversity.” The problem with the notion of diversity, as we have become familiar with its use in education, is that it focuses on the external rather than internal. Achieving diversity–whether of backgrounds, of identity, or even of opinion–is noble goal but should always, in a school, be a secondary goal. A healthy, vibrant school should produce a diversity of opinions as a fruit of its existence. Aiming for a “diverse” environment itself can only lead to calls for quotas.

A better goal is, in my mind, a more old-fashioned one–that schools should aim to pursue truth. Schools should be rigorously dedicated to teaching their students how to think, not what to think. Expose them to the world around them, in all its ugliness and beauty, and help them develop their logical faculties (why don’t high schools teach logic anymore?) and ability to support their own beliefs by appealing to truths accessible to all through reason, not just their own personal feelings. Maybe Dr. Haidt is onto something with that joking reference to Plato’s Academy!

This is perhaps the most underappreciated consequence of giving in to demands for institutional support. Once you establish official university offices for various “affinity groups,” “diversity,” and “inclusion,” etc., the people who staff those offices have every incentive to continue to perpetuate a crisis mentality on campus and encourage divisive student activism. They have little interest in fomenting real racial dialogue not just for ideological reasons, but also because resolving the conflicts would threaten their raison d’etre.

In the future, these offices will be staffed by the veterans of these protests and will continue to promote de facto segregation and stoke racial tension on campus. As Haidt pointed out in his post, they’ve already become the go-to offices of re-education for white males who don’t toe the PC line and their roles will only continue to increase to include things like being required to sign off on faculty search pools and hires as “diverse enough.”

I’d be interested in empirically studying the effects of such institutional support on racial climate, but as a white, cis-gendered, heteronormative, conservative male, I’m already the most hated (and soon-to-be-discriminated-against, if these faculty diversity mandates come to fruition) kind of person on campus, so I’ll stick to studying a completely different topic and place my hope with the safely tenured (though is tenure mob-proof?) folks of Heterodox Academy.

JS, on The Problem page it reads in part: “…you’ll find evidence that in most academic fields, progressives outnumber conservatives by ratios that often exceed ten to one.”

I thought university meant, per Webster’s dictionary, “an institution of higher learning that gives degrees in special fields and where research is performed.” Why would that be subversive of necessity? Discovery might be cutting edge, but hopefully not in the sense of eliminating dissent. I would think universities arose out of the very cultures/traditions that came to value viewpoint diversity as far back as the Ancient Greeks up through the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. Probably something we should abandon with some trepidation?

I get your point. I guess what I’m referring to is the challenging of the status quo, which is something that comes more naturally to the progressive side of the spectrum than the conservative side (tradition is, after all, the status quo), and which is something that at least in the west, is done more in academia than other spheres. It’s precisely your example of dissent that I’m referring to: dissent is by its nature subversive.

[Note that I’m referring to progressive/conservative ways of thinking (e.g. Trying new things vs sticking with what works) and not political positions (pro abortion vs anti abortion) that are often called “progressive” or “conservative” but which are often both equally entrenched in ideology.]

Back to my other point about whether conservatives might be less likely to even want to pursue careers in challenging the status quo, I wonder if the Western university is as likely to be populated mostly by liberals in the same way that construction sites are populated mostly by men and day cares are populated mostly by women. In other words, it may have a lot to do with the preferences of those people seeking those positions, and the common traits of those who rise to the top (e.g. Challenging authority is not something that traditionalist thinking does easily but may be rewarded in the academic setting).

Having said all that, I realize both that challenging authority can be a career ending move in any field, and that there is plenty of discrimination towards those on the right wing within the academic context that doesn’t exist toward, say, men in day cares or women in constriction sites.

What I do believe is that progressive and traditional ways of thinking both have their merits. No society can function without either. But the ratio matters too. Too much tradition, and society becomes rigid and brittle; too much progressivism and society becomes unstable. But time and place also matter. Conservative, “stick with what works” thinking might be ideal for some societies and workplaces, but it probably wouldn’t help anyone get ahead in silicon valley. Maybe the university is another place where it just isn’t ideal. But of course challenging the status quo — dissent — isn’t always good either, and if too many people are doing it at once, it becomes difficult for anyone to get anything done!

I think that in the recent overreach of political correctness we are seeing one of the mismatches between progressive thinking and “progressive” political positions, whereby those who think they are progressive are shutting down dissent on particular issues — precisely the thing that progressives should be for, not against! Perhaps it has become more about substance than the process, which is a problem I think, because focusing on process is better suited to adapting to changing conditions; focusing on substance leads too easily to ideology and dogma.

These are all open questions. I really don’t think I know the answers!

Language carries a lot of freight; your definitions of Progressive & Conservative are interesting, but they are also incomplete. I do live in Silicon Valley and I am often described as innovative and even disruptive, yet most of what I am trying to disrupt is the status quo — designed, nurtured and maintained by the political left — all of whom happily accept the term Progressive as a way to describe their worldview.

If “conservative” in your lexicon means one who understands:

> The significance of the Magna Carta
> The history & lessons of the Fall of Rome and the French Revolution
> The arguments about virtue, freedom & anarchy in the Federalist Papers
> The grand compromises that were struck at the Constitutional Convention
> The constitutional crisis that led to the Civil War and the after-effects
> The Wilsonian amendments & the genesis of the New Deal under FDR
> The loss of fiscal accountability & public integrity by the Federal Govt

Then I qualify as conservative, (subspecies: libertarian) given the lessons I draw wisdom from go back in history. However, in the modern American scene, we are the disruptive force, challenging the status quo that vests nearly unlimited power in the hands of politicians. This is done in the name of “Progress” so the coercive power of the State can be enlisted to serve the agenda of the Democrats. Orwell was a genius and he saw our future clearly.

Progressive-Conservative-Liberal-Socialist-Democratic — many labels are thrown around, but they may not convey much information in 2015.

I think the issues on campus are more likened to “illiberal” liberalism rather than liberal Vs. conservative thinking. That is why people who self identify as liberal are siding with those who consider themselves conservative. PC thinking and shutting down dissenting voices isn’t liberal or conservative in nature. It is authoritarianism that we all should eschew.

I disagree that conservatives are not agents of change. Rather than resist change, conservatives believe in using established social networks to enact change.

I agree with your call to include more diverse opinions in our institutions, even if it means that left leaning groups welcome more conservative voices (I would assume you feel the reverse is true, but that your audience is mainly liberal so don’t need to point that out).

But I wonder about a possible contradiction when it comes to higher education. One of the characteristics of the university system is that it tends to be cutting edge, pushing the envelope. That it would be doing so in the realm of science and technology goes without saying, but it does so in terms of culture as well. That sort of flies in the face of a more traditional view, the kind conservatives are more likely to hold. Isn’t the sort of thing universities tend (or have tended until recently) to do ultimately subversive, and if so is a university really the sort of place for traditionalism? And if traditionalism really does belong in a university would those individuals who feel strongly that maintaining tradition and cultural norms is important even want to be a part of it?

Or Maybe all that is true, but in the high school context, the balance is more important since we’re laying the foundation of knowledge by which those students will later judge everything else….?

What a strange post. It immediately reminds me of some of the John Oliver-style mockery about “how can people have these outdated opinions in 2015?” A point of view does not have an expiration date. Either it is logically consistent and relevant to the person holding it, or not.

Older perspectives that informed our legal precedents, our history, and our traditions are obviously of cultural interest, useful for analyzing their value – which should be assumed to be high, since those perspectives got us here – and understanding our current mindset. The idea of values and culture being “cutting edge” in the same way that scientific research is at the forefront speaks to a mind that considers morality to be evolving towards an end state, and is thus close minded towards the idea that the underlying value of that end state might be productively questioned. It’s assumed that being subversive of the present order is fundamentally good and part of human enlightenment. Why does going to a university have to involve disliking and assaulting your society like this?

It seems a strange comment to you because its slimy memetic origin is a Khmer Rouge-like insanity. A little preview of the end game of leftism.

The Zeroist is right, in one sense. Young, enlightened white men need to withdraw from participation in the institutions. The game is stacked against them now and will only get worse as time goes on.

They are already censored. Next up are more aggressive modes of suppression. (“Yes Means Yes,” anyone? Only a decade ago it was a punchline. Now it is policy and, in some states, the law for college men.)

Fighting leftism on its home turf, the madrasa-like university and an increasingly hostile bureaucracy, is an unwinnable war. Participation is not just tacit support; tuition is, literally, material support for people who hate you. Withdrawal and attrition is the only way forward.

JS, that is a false dilemma. Just because people are left wing doesn’t mean that they are progressive and/or right. And dissenters aren’t automatically conservative. For instance, I believe that society is guilty of ignoring female perpetrators of (sexual) violence and male victims. This deviates from feminist dogma and is thus not PC. Yet my opinion is more progressive IMHO, as it lets go of the classic ‘men are uniquely violent and lecherous’ gender stereotype, which unfortunately has been adopted by most progressives.

The second mistake you make is to think that good ideas can develop without challenge. You seem to feel that these kids cannot think for themselves and need to be indoctrinated into the right beliefs. The problem with that idea is that historically many were fully convinced that they were right and that they should do this indoctrinating, while actually being quite wrong. It’s extremely arrogant to think that you are perfectly right this time and that a clash of ideas will corrupt children, rather than teach them to think for themselves.

There’s a rule of thumb that tuning investigative procedures to avoid false positives and false negatives represents a trade-off: carefully avoiding one increases the likelihood of the other.

The “cutting edge” of any field can reasonably be described as populated by researchers who are avoiding false negatives and thus leaning toward the false positive side. Too many of these would mean the field would gradually accumulate inaccurate results and build them into elaborate fantasies, while too many cautious error-checkers would tend to restrict new ideas in the field. The optimal goal is obviously a balance, but if the results are meant to be applied to something important, it’s desirable to tune things a little toward the false negative side (civil engineering favors safety, or “sticking with what works”, for instance). If we’re applying the social sciences to real-world social policy and legal decisions, we should arguably think of the field in those terms.

Certainly, academic research often favors “the cutting edge” in terms of grants and career advancement, and that could be considered a problem. Also, the instructional side of academia is arguably supposed to put more effort into avoiding false positives simply to avoid propagating mistakes to incoming students.

A mapping of conservative and liberal social stances onto these research procedures (a mapping I don’t necessarily agree with) would be an argument for a deliberately maintaining a 50/50 balance in academic staffing engaged in anything that could be considered research.

You may feel that your views are modern, and that may be true, but it doesn’t mean they work and are correct.

A case in point is the state of black culture in the United States. Blacks have been mired in a cycle of little improvement in fortunes for the past 50 years, ever since the beginning of the Great Society programs. Despite huge preferences in hiring, huge boosts in government aid, huge efforts to integrate, and constant propaganda programs, their personal income and wealth are deteriorating compared to whites. Why is this?

It is because the left-leaning heterodoxy simply doesn’t work. Conservative views hold true and have for millennia because families *do* work. You may feel that your newfangled ideas about the government and community substituting for family *should* work, but it is completely clear they do not. Blacks are suffering because the left has failed them. Their families are in tatters. They have supported the Democratic Party for years. And now the Dems are suffering at the state and local level because people are getting this. The Democratic Party is utterly desperate now, and all they can do is try to stoke racial tensions to distract from it all. The cognitive dissonance is getting greater and greater.

Now comes this controversy, which adds to the disconnect. Here are the people driving the conversation on the left, and their balance sheet of ideas is completely out of whack. They are running roughshod over our most basic freedoms while asking for trivialities which are comical. More and more people are rejecting this leftist claptrap. At what point does the Democratic dog distance itself from these fleas?

It will be interesting to see what happens.

P.S. I detest the CAPTCHA games. They are not cute after the first one, and they aren’t working and reliable.

“That sort of flies in the face of a more traditional view, the kind conservatives are more likely to hold.”

I couldn’t disagree more strongly. Universities and education in general used to be about expanding ones horizons, teaching you to consider all sides and be tolerant of views other than your own, challenging your assumptions, and so on.

Now it’s morphing into a very narrow ideological plantation that one dare not step off of for fear of being branded a heretic and run out with pitchforks and torches. It’s antithetical to actual learning, to expanding ones horizons, and to expanding one’s way of thinking.

Wrong. The university is supposed to be about seeking truths about the universe, not about “pushing the envelope.” Do you really think that education should be some sort of ritual where students dress up and play “Radical” the way that kids play “Cops and Robbers?” “Being edgy” and “pushing the envelope” is the stuff of transgressive performance art, not intellectualism.

Your argument can be stated as “isn’t it better that the university is subversive rather than traditional, after all it has *traditionally* been subversive.”

And of course, you see the Right adopt these tactics as well (and they have in the past) – especially the religious right who can’t tolerate questioning their beliefs or carving out a special zone of rights for beliefs that call themselves religious. War on Christmas/Christians is the right-wing version of this sort of thinking. And demonizing people as “marxist” who have more complicated views is the right’s version of dismissing people witout the right views as “racist”. The problem is sacred values that mark you as a tribe member in good standing.

No, the right doesn’t control the media. The idea that because someone is “rich”, they’re part of the right, is a completely incorrect assumption from the word go. The richest people in this country all lean left, from those in the entertainment and media industry, to the titans in IT (Bill Gates, anyone).

Most rich corporations are controlled by the left. Just look up how much money these companies’ CEO’s give to which political parties. Because it isn’t the GOP.

The majority of news stations, news papers, journalists, etc., unquestionably lean left. The majority self identify as liberals, they donate to liberals. Also, as someone else has already noted, the Democrats are the party of the rich now and have been for a number of years, not the Republicans.

It is probably fair at this point to say this is an American problem, not right or left. The ‘new’ for these youngsters is almost certainly social-media cocooning. We do not have to interact with those outside our tribe — and when we are injured by those outside, we find validation by complaining online to our tribe. A generation ago, you weren’t able to filter interactions so finely.

However, it’s my sense that viewpoint cocooning and inequality is outpacing income inequality among “elites,” especially in service industries — government, education, law, marketing, finance, entertainment, etc. If you want to get ahead in those industries, you self-censor like crazy. So the cocooning has the effect of a liberal privileging in these industries.

Brian, you are correct. No need to argue. It’s a problem wherever it is found, whomever is doing it. But sacred values do not of necessity need to be at odds with rooting this problem out. We need a deep pluralism for democracy to continue to succeed.

Interesting recent event: self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders spoke at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell, an outspoken social conservative. The Liberty students – overwhelmingly conservative – listened respectfully to Sanders and posed questions to him respectfully. Contrast their behavior with the left-wing students everywhere else, who shout down or otherwise try to silence dissenting views. This anti-free speech problem is 99% a creation of the Left, in education, popular culture, and journalism.

It’s rather a problem of some people who do not exactly know what left is supposed to be taking that position (or rather the plethora of positions that could be named leftist) down the gutter.

One rather famous leftist person was Rosa Luxemburg. She said that freedom is always the freedom of dissenters to speak out. (which is very much in the tradition of Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – it wasn’t Voltaire who wrote that!).

What planet are you living on? Christians have been tolerating question of their beliefs (and alot worse) for the past 2000 years. There is an entire theological school of study called Apolegtics devoted to anticipating and logically answering objections to the faith. “A special zone of rights for beliefs that call themselves religious”? Yes, we call them “churches”. People who want to join one generally have to hold belief in a general core confession of faith. How is this a scandal…except that their not government or Media/Hollywood controlled and one of the few respites from the liberal uber-culture out there. “The problem is sacred values that mark you as a tribe member in good standing.” No, the problem is that we live in a fallen world where there is a conflict between Good and evil, righteousness and wickedness, people who follow God and people who rebel against him. There is a distinction to be made, and sides need to be taken. That the REAL world, not the fake fantasy dystopia liberals are trying to construct.

Are you actually implying that your god is part of the real world? I have no problem with you believing whatever you wish, but this is not a problem where a lack of religion is a source. Christians have the same victimhood complex, as you are so clearly demonstrating in this comment. You’re SO oppressed in America, it’s not like every president we’ve ever had has been openly Christian. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
People question your beliefs because there is little evidence for them. If you choose to still have faith, that’s fine, and I commend you. But victimhood is certainly not a result of not enough Christianity.

When was the last time a religious group on campus did any of the things we have seen in recent times with regard to silencing others and physically oppressing others on campus? When did one of them say “we need some muscle over here”? Come on, how often do you hear “racism” denounced by protesters and how often “marxism”? Your attempt to claim equivalence is pathetic.

The war on Christmas refers to the aggressive transformation of a Christmas celebration into a non-religious, anything goes “holiday” celebration, a “cultural appropriation” if I have ever encountered one. Here in San Diego we have people opposed to a Christmas parade because the parade organizers don’t include other religions. Why don’t we insist that Black Lives Matter demonstrations include representatives of the KKK? I say all of this, by the way, as an atheist.

I think a large portion of people in this country, left, right, white, black, rich, poor, even journalists are just like the kids in the article who felt they had to walk on eggshells.

If I trace back this crazy ideology with a cursory questioning of where I have seen these circular arguments, trigger warnings and safe spaces the most, I quickly come up with third wave feminism. And if you read about feminism, you find it was very much influenced by marxism.

It might be bad form to name the (pink, dare I say) elephant in the room, but I will be like that one kid that didn’t care. Crunch, I guess that’s the sound of the eggshells I don’t care to walk around.

You clearly know little about the “religious right.” Hang out for a little while in right wing circles and you will hear people who are much, much more tolerant and much, much more able to engage in productive and logical argument, not name calling.

I would argue that there is no “long history of intolerance” in the last 60 years on the right. A reading of M Stanton Evans’s biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy shows he wasn’t intolerant, always let folks speak themselves out.

The supposed intolerance of the right is a myth constructed by the left. It’s a smoke screan to cover for the lefts own intolerance. A very good one, for instance many of the right have accepted the endlessly repeated myth of McCarthy.

Many left wing, not all, protests reduce down to physical bullying. The left already dominate the media. It’s not left wingers in danger of loosing their job for not accepting “action at a distance” ideology such as “structural” biases.

Ah, the complicated views of Marxism.Indeed, papa Marx and his glorious views … how much misery did it cause in this world, and people still don’t admit it. Marxism is as bad as the ideology of Nazism. To light a Christmas tree for 3-4 weeks a year is indeed an ordeal comparable with radical feminism, affirmative action brainwashing, victimization, labeling, all sort of nonsense courses… yeah

My white male sons are now 30 and 28. I’m so happy they escaped public high school relatively unscathed, but I could see the beginnings of the nonsense, led by a faculty of activist females and male eunuchs. Public schooling in this country may have begun with noble intent; kids are now truly being inculcated rather than educated.

Thank Mr. Haidt for taking on this challenge. It could only be purposely done from some who himself is left-leaning. I can only imagine the derision someone center-right would have to endure to get such an unpopular message out. I wish you the best of luck.

A privileged white male should not be writing an article about how he and other white males feel bullied into not being in a comfortable place in terms of speaking freely. This problem is way too complicated to be traced to a root problem of outspoken women and liberals…? And someone center-right would have perfect comfort in many conservative leaning places in the US. Mr. Haidt visited many knowingly heavily left leaning places in the US. Maybe he should try a different audience.

Asa, read over what you’ve written, and try to imagine how it looks to someone who wants to understand you, but does not share your view of the world. If you want to communicate, try building a coherent argument on a common premise or two. If you can’t, consider that you might be wrong.

Not just in high school. It permeates the cirriculum, even at middle school. For instance, the required reading of “All The Right Stuff”, by Dean Myers. The students are doused in the language of victimhood.

“There was one contract for the well off white men… and another for people from Africa. But the one with the most weight was the one for white men.” The Revolutionary War (of 1775) was supposed to deliver freedom for all via a democracy, but “that’s called a lie… What they were really saying was that the white men of this country were going to rule it.”

While the protagonist changes his life around based on his understanding of the prevailing “social contract”, the reader walks away with a different idea. They obtain a sense of the Hobbes notion of “He who as the Gold, makes the Rules”, or even “Might makes Right”.

This is the perfect mold for future “bully” victims.

Renee
on September 11, 2016 at 3:05 pm

It was not worded white men. It was worded white LANDED men. Only men with land were able in the beginning to make decisions.

The argument you find “reasonable” goes a bit like: “You are while, therefore you are privileged, therefore you shouldn’t write about these things”.

Just reread it. It isn’t even an unreasonable argument as it is not an argument at all. It’s a call to the writer to simply go away.

I don’t know if you took the logic course you advice others. I for one never took a logic class. But if this is the level of thinking you thinks others should “obviously” recognize as “reasonable argument” I’m afraid you need more than merely a logic course.

@backup I’m pretty sure he was trying to communicate that the statement, as read by most people, doesn’t add too much to the discussion, and as such would benefit from rewording in a charitable, willing-to-engage fashion.

“White male” encompasses over a hundred million people from widely divergent backgrounds, experiences, ethnicities, ideas, and approaches. To assume that you can lump together all this with the term “white males” is essentially racist and sexist. You can claim…I disagree…that it’s a benign form of racism and sexism, perhaps. But that’s what it is.

If I have read correctly past the ambiguous construction of your post, YOU seem to want it both ways: you just speak, and we just shut up. By threatening our rights, you are invalidating your own. That’s the world YOU are creating. Why can’t everyone speak, and everyone listen?

“If I have read correctly past the ambiguous construction of your post…”

There’s nothing to read past. Those three simple sentences weren’t ambiguous in the least.

“YOU seem to want it both ways: you just speak, and we just shut up.”

Are you saying that the phrase “white males should be free to talk about white males being bullied” somehow implies that people of color should shut up? And if so, when you say things like “people of color should be free to talk about people of color being bullied”, is that just a different way of saying that white people need to stop talking?

“By threatening our rights, you are invalidating your own.”

He didn’t threaten anyone’s rights, he affirmed white people’s rights to self-advocacy. By affirming his own rights, he validated yours.

“That’s the world YOU are creating. Why can’t everyone speak, and everyone listen?”

If you want to know why it’s not possible for everyone to listen, ask yourself why it was so hard for you to listen just now.

The issue is not that women and PoC get to talk, the issue is that others do not.

And I don’t see why white men cannot speak about the problems they experience. It’s beyond irony that you say that they should up because they have privilege. Being silenced is disprivilege and you cannot fix ‘privilege’ by selectively taking away freedom of speech for groups that you deem too privileged.

Your assertion that they need to shut up is exactly the kind of bullying that these kids were subject too and that you are engaged in.

Speaking about one’s own problems is neither necessary nor prudent. It is utile, if you’re having discussions of ‘issues’ in a secondary school classroom (and that sounds peculiar right there), that the young men get to push back without being penalized. If you have a teaching staff composed of women on the one hand and men who are not at home in their male skin on the other, penalties will likely be imposed.

Asa makes clear her racism and sexism by making it explicit that because Haidt is white and male he should just shut up and that no one reading him should take him seriously. Asa perfectly represents the deep intolerance and bigotry of leftists.

It’s not like the comment itself makes any sense — it just clips on “privileged white male” to a mess of purple prose and people naturally gravitate to the only part of the comment that’s at all coherent.

Call me skeptical, but that’s a lot more common among trolls who have no idea how to comprehend the words they’re using.

I don’t even think you can call it leftist. This is just an intolerant confused ideology, and I say that as a liberal leaning independent.

My view is that this ideology began with marxism within feminist circles and then it was distributed through non-peer reviewed gender study courses taken mostly by liberal women who happen to go into teaching much more than men.

I think arguing this as a right vs left political problem is a mistake. Granted it’s appearing on the left, but I believe that it will not be hard at all to find allies against this malady amongst democrats.

Living in a country other than the USA I find it quite amusing what kind of stuff you may consider leftist. From the outside no considerable political movement in the USA is anywhere near left, both big parties are right or very far right respectively. And the left is very diverse in other parts of the world, starting from social democratic movements via Marxist-Leninist followers to anarchist (in the sense of a society that does not require leaders, not the commonly used sense of total chaos).

Anyway, I agree with you points and find the whole situation as described in the article above, the Yale Problem, and so on, deeply concerning. Stuff that happens in the USA usually swaps over to Europe sooner or later and I for one do not want to live in a society where people are not allowed to voice their opinon (as long as it is within the boundaries of the law – I do not advocate hate speech). Comments like yours give me some kind of hope that there is a majority of people in the USA who will actually stand up for free speech and diversity of opinion.

I also from another in another country than USA.
I am in Latin Europe and this is nothing more than another Marxist power tactic. Victimhood is a Leftist tactic.

In its form goes from bureaucratic intimidation with professors acumen to violence threats and bullying presented with Orwellian newspeak to get away.
Intolerant Leftism.
When i see some videos the feeling i get are revolutionary guards without guns . Yet.

That is why i say that today the center of World Marxism is USA. Unfortunately it already infected our public schools since some mandarins in our Education Ministry came with Boston University courses.

In Europe you see this already widespread in England.

And the like all extreme leftism it devours itself. After millions of Communists killed millions of other Communists.
I am afraid Schools and universities will never recover from this.

@ ND dude
No, not at all. Europe has free markets and low taxes, too, but many places in Europe also consider stuff like puplic health insurance as normal and not as left-wing. We didn’t have McCarthy and we don’t have as much poverty as the USA.

@ Art Deco
While I do not think that our political systems are perfect, or close to that, I wouldn’t consider them as rotten. Mind that there are many countries in Europe and they are not all the same. Most countries offer political systems that offer minorities a political voice (in some countries a party needs to get 3% of votes to get a seat in the parliement, in others it is 5%, some have a 10% hurdle).

Furthermore, I didn’t mean to condescend anyone. Sorry if I put it in a way that made you understand that.

Well, I am no insider of the USA, but from the outside it doesn’t always look as if you are more alert to putrescence.

@ FreedomFan
No, that is not what I meant to say. I think the law term for what I wanted to say is “incitement of the people”. And I actually think that you know what I meant to say.

@ LL
What vicitimhood? “That is why i say that today the center of World Marxism is USA.” This actually is so funny. Now, I am no expert on Marxism (thought it was outdated some time ago), but didn’t he propagate samething about a society without classes and that the industrial good should be owned by the workers. If it is like this in the USA, then the European media entirely failed to report it.

England (I guess you meant the UK) is a nice example. Rising poverty due to austerity policy. Well, I was raised in part by nuns, hence I find it not exactly Christian to take from the poor in order to give it to the rich.

There is probably no country that actually was communistic although they claimed to be. The Soviet Union was a rather fascistic system for instance. Just the same as in many other countries. Take Germany for instance. Often ruled by a so called Christian party, but not behaving/acting like that at all. Does Christianity therefore devour itself?

@ all
Well, from what I have seen and learned in my life, it is often any sort of fanatism that causes most problems, and most victims, be it politically, religiously or in any other way.

You do realize we have no desire in America to pay any attention to what is your European concept of “hate speech”. If you can’t say what you want, speech is not free. There are too many gradations to set any line. And as we are seeing right here, the left would be moving that line on a daily basis.

Already there are too many stories out of Europe that show this process. How glad I am to be an American.

anteater wrote:
“Now, I am no expert on Marxism (thought it was outdated some time ago), but didn’t he propagate samething about a society without classes and that the industrial good should be owned by the workers.”

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the early 20th century, thought that it was necessary for Marxists to achieve cultural hegemony in western societies as a precondition for imposing economic Marxism. He is the intellectual father of the “cultural Marxism” we are seeing in action but is rarely recognized as such.

Marian
on August 10, 2016 at 12:12 pm

Anteater–how did you select the name “anteater” –what does it refer to?

The only thing I take issue with is the notion that this sort of thing begins in high school and not college. The university is the fount from where society gets these ideas. “Victimization” is only one aspect of political correctness: specifically, the idea of polylogism. That’s where we get the nonsense about some people not being “qualified” to comment on the “experiences” of other people. It’s a completely illiberal idea.

Twenty-something years ago, people were complaining about our P.C. campuses. Dinesh D’Souza wrote “Illiberal Education” in the 1990’s. A decade before that, Allan Bloom was lamenting the “Closing of the American Mind.” A little more than a decade before Bloom, Ayn Rand was condemning the New Left’s hold on the American campus. What we are seeing now is simply a continuation.

This is not merely about who’s a victim and who isn’t. It’s an outright attack on the Great Conversation that is the West’s great contribution to human culture, what I would argue is the single greatest contribution to human culture. Those who wish to stifle the conversation are guilty of nothing more than wanton destruction. They are modern day Visigoths and Vandals.

Having taught in elementary, middle, and high schools, I disagree. In my experience, the “victimhood culture” stems from the time when kids begin to identify with one group or another – 6th grade, or roughly the onset of puberty. Kids bully those that they perceive as “other” – and the “others” have relatively little power to stop it. Yes, this is very broad, but I think my point is clear.

As they get older, that identity sets in. Cliques form, students spend time with other students who identify with them, and some groups have more sway than others – jocks vs geeks, for example. Since high schoolers are increasingly aware ofmthenworld around them, they hear what happens in the adult world and in college, and begin to mimic those behaviors.

Thus, I agree that this problem of “shutting down dissent” begins in high school. And we need to inculcate the ethos of “values diversity” in middle school, as soon as possible. Otherwise, we get kids that have no problem pinning other kids to the wall and cursing at them because they won’t stop studying in a library when the protesters walk through.

Cliques and bullying, then, are recent phenomena of the past 15 years or so? Obviously, they’re not. So, I don’t see how your explanation accounts for what we’re seeing. Cliques and bullying long predate this culture of victimhood that has our society in its grip.

I feel that this comment is racist against white people. Further, to indicate that the problem is too complex without addressing that complexity specifically in some way is unfair and unconstructive. If you need to stereotype me – t I am a non-white, male

This is circular logic. White people shouldn’t speak up on white people not feeling allowed to speak up. Imagine if Fredrick Douglass or Martin Luther King had adhered to similar logic and decided to wait to speak up until it was deemed socially acceptable for “their kind” to do so. No, the whole point is that EVERYONE should be allowed to speak, and your opinion on this is part of the problem (though, of course, I will tolerate your intolerant viewpoint, since you are a part of that “everyone”).

Well, Asa, you have the victim mentality and talking points down pat. What a shame your view is so narrow and constricted, and that you feel totally free to try to silence others rather than respect their right to voice their opinions even when different than yours.

Jonathan Haidt, the author, is a liberal himself – but he sees very clearly the massive problems with narrowing the world down to an ideological plantation and then trying to silence or evict everyone with a difference of opinion as if they were heretics.

I bet you claim to support diversity, and yet here you are, trying to silence someone simply because they happen to be a white male professor – one who makes great points no less. For shame. Do you not see the hypocrisy and bigotry you are exuding?

“someone center-right would have perfect comfort in many conservative leaning places in the US. Mr. Haidt visited many knowingly heavily left leaning places in the US. Maybe he should try a different audience.”

Were there loads of schools in the US where male students and their teachers intimidated female students into silence, Asa would have no objection, because Asa isn’t a total hypocrite.

You did exactly what he criticised. Who are you to tell someone he shouldent write about ? Gestapo ? screw off and get out into the real world and out of your shitty self-centered savespace. Disgusting.

Mr. Haidt teaches at NYU. He knows about liberal enviros. I’m a liberal white male and I agree with Mr. Haidt. I’m sure I have many blind spots & can’t speak with authority BECAUSE of my white male privilege. And it’s important to create enviros where everyone listens, everyone can challenge and be challenged, and no one self censors except for hate speech and profanity. For too long people like me have dominated speech enviros because of our privilege. We need to step back, listen more…but a backlash silencing of conservative viewpoints is toxic.

Carrying those attitudes into the real world with you, will not bring you success. Life is not fair, and while you may throw intended epithets around like “privileged white males” around to gain political advantage, and it may carry currency at the academic level, it means little in the real world. You will most likely wind up as some toadie working in some government bureaucracy, where those type of whiney thought permeate the employee population. I am also guessing you where born in the 85 to 97 cohort, or the participation trophy generation.

Harvard University, ca. 1921, might be so regarded, at least insofar as its administration was a defender of old stock Americans and their particular features contra Jewish immigrants. I’m not sure with regard to pedagogic questions that would be the case. That particular Harvard president also presided over the elimination of the Latin entrance examination in 1916 (the Greek having been eliminated in 1897). The fellow who was president of Colgate University ca. 1932 was a virulent critic of the New Deal; he also implemented extensive amendments to the contours of the curriculum and persuaded the trustees to divorce the college from its associated seminary; which was the salient act which cost Colgate its Baptist ethos.

Perhaps we ought to have educational institutions where everyone feels free to exercise their first amendment rights without fear. How does that sound? As regards the elite private schools which are so uniformly leftist, every one of them has gotten billions in taxpayer money for scientific research and many other things. If they want to run little Maoist kiddy kamps they can damn well do it without a dime of public funds.

And as for privilege, it comes in many guises and is not the monopoly of any one race or gender. Black Lives Matter protesters are currently “privileged” to shout down presidential candidates, college newspaper reporters, and even college presidents. If they could go back and try that 75 years ago they would learn what real white privilege was – and how far the country has progressed since then.

I have a long memory and I well know it hurts for young people to be told to grow up. But sometimes that’s exactly the message they need to hear.

“A privileged white male should not be writing an article about how he and other white males feel bullied into not being in a comfortable place in terms of speaking freely. ”

Explain to me how Mr. Haidt is MORE privileged than his audience. Even more important: explain to me why someones alleged privilege is enough to not write about what he saw and experienced. Bullying is bullying, no matter who notices it.

“And someone center-right would have perfect comfort in many conservative leaning places in the US. Mr. Haidt visited many knowingly heavily left leaning places in the US. Maybe he should try a different audience.”

Aha. You mean to say one should select audiences that are already agreeing with your point of view. But why then have these talks if they simply are designed – by picking the right audiences – to affirm whatever you believe? Aren’t they a massive waste of time then?

“You mean to say one should select audiences that are already agreeing with your point of view. But why then have these talks if they simply are designed – by picking the right audiences – to affirm whatever you believe? Aren’t they a massive waste of time then?”

The purpose of that is self-congratulation and emotional empowerment. People who aren’t interested in facts or truth see no other point intellectual discourse than to communicate popular ideas in order to signal status to the audience and have them clap.

Prof. Haidt is trying to help people like you.
Maybe at a different time in history it was those on the right that needed to learn tolerance and diversity, but right now the biggest problem is on the left.

The victimhood culture and oppression Haidt is deriding harms YOU. It makes you less of a person than you could be. If the values you espouse have merit – they will hold up to the criticisms and attacks of those who hold different views. If they do not, it is irrelevant who exposed their flaws. By protecting your self from speech you find offensive, you are living in a bubble. You are preventing yourself from learning and growing. You are preventing your own ideas from developing.
Good ideas not only survive but improve when challenged.

“A priveleged white male should not…” What ever comes after that opening clause does not even deserve to be read. Clearly the writer who penned that monumentally hypocritical (and dare I say embarrassing un-self aware) opener, in just six short words, broadcast to the entire world their small minded and bigoted view of race, gender and politics. White males should have no voice and be stripped of all rights–come on, Asa say it!! At least have the strength of conviction to come out and say exactly what you mean and expose yourself to the world as the small minded hateful bigot that you are.

Asa – this is how mob mentality has always worked. Look around at all the historical instances where millions of others have perished with thinking just like yours. Instead of swinging the pendulum to an equal level you and your thought buddies want it now swung your way. This is a power grab pure and simple. You do not want justice and equality. You want power and your way pure and simple. Please be honest with yourself.

Spot on. The whole reason that these white male students feel like they are walking on eggshells is because they have been “shot as messengers” repeatedly no matter what message they might carry (wrong or right).

This then raises the question, who is doing the “shooting?” Why, of course the persons in power, who of course want to stay in power.

America appears to be raising a generation of proto-fascists, ready to bring Communist-China-style silencing of political dissidents here.

Your argument is nothing more than an ad hominem attack (“A PRIVILEGED WHITE MALE should not be writing an article about how he and other white males feel bullied into not being in a comfortable place in terms of speaking freely.”) followed by a blatant Straw-Man Fallacy. Mr. Haidt did not argue that the root problem was “outspoken women and liberals,” rather that bullying was creating fewer and “fewer outspoken men and conservatives.”

More generally, he argues that EVERYONE is the “victimizer” in some social demographic (unless you’re a handicapped, non-white, female, genderqueer,liberal,vegan atheist, and then you’re obviously the “victim” of EVERYBODY). And your moral claim to victimhood gives you the moral right to tell your victimizers to Shut Up.

As you have done by arguing that a Privileged White Male should not be talking about this (except perhaps to apologize).

The formulation victimhood culture sounds strange to me. Like a mark which can be put on communities. I don’t like that. The ones snapping their fingers are also children.

The main point, that this is not a culture which fosters exchange and challenging of ideas in a friendly, cooperative way oriented on improving understanding of oneself, that’s a point I would like to see more.

Your message reads like “it’s not your place to talk about this”. This is what is being told to women all over the world.

Is your goal to make people feel like they have to hide their opinion, or do you want to change these opinions by making them understand?

I’m missing a self-reflection in the text, though: Why is Mr. Haidt invited, and why did the people accept his points so quickly, while when feminists and minority activists try to engage conservative people, it takes years of hard work?

Asa, let ideas stand or fall based on their own merits or demerits, not on the physical accidents of the individual expressing the ideas. Would you argue that a white, female Christian shouldn’t express an opinion about how religion and government should interact just because Christians ar the dominant culture in the U.S.? What if her opinion was that secularism should be supported? Would she be wrong just because she’s a Christian?

“White privilege” is a leftist invention now part of the cliche language, to create animosity among ethnic and racial groups, and it is mainly about legitimized social envy. Grow up, think critically and address your frustrations with maturity. We are all ought to improve ourselves! BTW: why those who preach “White privilege” use all the privilege that White scientists have created/discovered? Be honest!

To conduct discourse, the audience should be as random as possible. His freshman to senior spread in “Centerville” depicted not only a middle class diversity, but a group of kids exposed to all that our society offers, from print to internet.

There is a lessening of logic in this country, more people attempting to connect dots of disparity than linear. Pretty much the same as scientists of all stripes who set the results before running tests. There can be no empirical conclusion, since the premise for the argument, ie, “have you stopped beating your dog” is a locked query.

Intimidation, bullying, is becoming more common as a tool to restrain conversation, and it’s happening all over the country, not just “Centerville”.

We can and should value and listen to experiences of people with Les privilege. But we also can and should value informed comment and impartiality. A Palestinian woman whose home and family are decimated has an important perspective to offer. But if her suggested strategy for solving her problem is “exterminate the Jewish dogs” as much of Hamas advocates, then her unprivileged experience does not negate her lack of information and extreme partiality.
We can’t ascertain she lacks impartiality just because she’s Palestinian. Just so, we can’t ascertain Haidt cannot understand this situation outside of his privilege.
Once you allow that anyone group of people can’t speak because they couldn’t possibly speak outside of their experience you have given up on ANY consensus being possible in society. We have so much progress to point to in terms of civil rights and gay marriage, it’s pretty obvious people can think outside their own experience. Why give up just because progress is slow?

Thank you, Colin. Just to clarify: I was on the left my whole life, until I wrote The Righteous Mind. Now I am non-partisan — I like many ideas from both sides of the spectrum, and I dislike both political parties. Also, I should add that my own field of social psychology has not ostracized me at all. In fact, my colleagues truly believe in the value of diversity, and they have been receptive to the arguments that viewpoint diversity is needed in social psychology. See Jarret Crawford’s post here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/21/political-diversity-response-to-33-critiques/

“I like many ideas from both sides of the spectrum, and I dislike both political parties.”

Good. The 1960s aren’t coming back. The 1980s aren’t coming back. Gee, I guess we’re going to have to think! Thanks so much for being a part of that.

One thought, related to your work on moral frameworks. While surveys may suggest low affinity on the Left for Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity, I’m going to contend that this is EXACTLY what you are encountering in episodes like the one you describe.

* INGROUP: To be outside the consensus is to be ostracized. This has been a feature of the Left for a long time. It’s where the coordinated snapping comes from, in the sense of ingrouping being the social mechanism that powers it. Ingroup is everything – including an arbiter of morality.

* AUTHORITY: There is also a clear hierarchy, which has now become crystal clear as a series of ethnic and sexual castes that have an observable pecking order of precedence. That is a structure of Authority.

* PURITY/SANCTITY? If you took Virtue Signalling and Holiness Spirals away from the modern Left, they would be struck mute. Not to be flip, because it’s a lethally serious issue. It’s what drives Leftist witch-hunting, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution killed tens of millions using those 2 core mechanisms.

Your thesis as I understand it is that you’re dealing with an incomplete moral framework. I would encourage you to take a second look, and consider whether you might just be facing a religion that won’t call itself one. One that sharply downplays the value of certain elements of the moral mind *because it doesn’t want people asking hard questions about its core elements of control.* By denigrating them, it conceals its use of them from its own supporters. By concealing these elements, it renders them immune to reflection or question.

Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity are pretexts, routinely violated in egregious ways. People keep noticing this about the Left, while never drawing the correct conclusion. Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity ARE the religion, denigrated for concealment. Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity are the magician’s left hand, please watch them carefully.

If you want to change this, you need to unlock the concealment, and force those discussions.

One thing I wonder about is whether areas where there’s a strong stigma against conservatism as people perceive it on a national level can lead people with conservative dispositions to develop a potentially unhealthy hybrid of conservatism and liberalism. There’s often a near universal theoretical support of liberal values like gender and racial equality as goals worth aspiring toward in these environments. That makes it the status quo.

In a subculture where left-wing ideology is the norm, what’s the conservative perspective? The one that defends the ideas expressed by the dominant moral narrative of the subculture, or the one that challenges those viewpoints? I would argue that we have something of a twisting at the far left of the political spectrum, where there’s an equivalent to a far right element in these subcultures that opposes both external challenges to its moral frameworks and internal attempts to reshape this moral framework to be more inclusive.

Jonathan, it’s not just schools or universities in which this discourse is becoming skewed. Workplaces too are engendering a classs of disaffected people who are permanently angry over the same issues as you observed in “Centerville”.

EDIT: I just realised my final point was already raised by Joe Katzman! Cheers Joe.

A particular cause of this simplified moral matrix is A) teachers are asked to teach about complex political issues to students who are developmentally at a literal and binary stage, and B) A lot of the syllabus tends to be influenced by post-colonialism and social justice that feeds very easily into “the sacralization of the victim” as, I think, you argue.
Even as a big proponent of cognitive bias and as a teacher that shows a lot of your and Ariely, Iyengar and other TED talks to my students, they struggle (like most adults) to break out of oversimplifications like victim=good therefore argument claiming POV of victim = factually correct.

I actually wonder if you’ve thought of adapting the hierarchy lever of the moral matrix that you previously allocated only to conservatives to “the food pyramid of privilege” on the left as I call it.

Haidt, you’ve spent your entire life lambasting people who are white, christian, and heterosexual. Why is it that now that when the cross hairs of liberalism are on your back you realize the error of your ways and now seek to stem the tide of the degeneracy that you yourself have help create?

You being jewish will only protect you for so long. In the end you’re still a straight white male who will be skewered on the mantle of progressivism. It’s high time you get skewered by the very team you’ve helped push out.

The comment of “Someone you badgered” is not intolerant if that’s what you are suggesting between the lines, it presents some facts about Mr. Haidt. The style is a bit sharp but considering what comes from the left, is a breeze. Anyway, I am glad that Mr. Haidt has a more balanced thinking, though I am more on the right than he is.

White males are called many things, racist bigot, sexist, homophobic, privileged, but there is one title that should not be overlooked. During the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI and WWII and all the small wars in between, White Males have been called the American Army. It might be wise to recall that amidst the berating and insulting that is so fashionable now.

Mr. Haidt, Many thanks for the fine article. Spot on. I am a Yale graduate and a few years removed from the institution but not too distant to forget the bullying you mention. The Yale situation is nothing more than a shakedown. The students who protested Halloween costumes *which were never worn or even conceived* asked for and appear to have browbeaten President Salovey (a good man, BTW) into millions of dollars of support for their agenda. This will include $2 million in support for each of the multicultural institutions (real bastions of academic freedom — LOL), forcing African American studies into the core curriculum, and other demands. So, as they say — follow the money — and this whole scheme is about money. The culture of victimization is about money — trial lawyers, lobbyists, educators, consultants, college coaches, even employers. Minority groups have become very very adept at packaging their victimization claims and converting them to cold, hard cash. Yale has a $22 billion dollar endowment. Does it make sense that the institutional left has them in their sights?

Whatever one’s race or gender a degree from Yale is membership in this nations most elite.

Rants of victimhood from those who will with certainty be among the ranks of the nations most priviledged ring hollow.

If Yale needs to do anything for those students protesting it, needs to assure that when they ascend to power and priviledge as most will, that they have the education and skills necescary to wisely excercise that power. It is evident from their current behavior that they do not, and we will all likely suffer for that.

Yale does not need to direct more funds to “multi-cultural” targets that are themselves little more than self segregating monolith’s celebrating narrow minority cultures, but to direct more resources to developing the basic skills of its students. It is not the inability to feel the pain of micro-agressions that threatens our future. It is the absence of the productive skills that a university is supposed to foster.

I am fairly flabbergasted by this post — Dr. Haidt was intimidated by the snapping of 15 year old girls? Felt that he was facing an “angry and unified mob” and is arguing for support for view point diversity of vulnerable white men (like those giving plenary lectures at private schools)?

Maybe next time he’s invited to speak at an elite private school like centrerville, he should request a trigger warning in case snapping might occur. The school can also be careful to inform him that he might encounter students who strongly disagree with him and are not afraid to voice their opinions.

After reading this article and a lot of the comments, I conclude that the problem(s) pointed out in this article is Liberalism. Liberalism is based on lies and distortions, always has been and always will be. A good reading of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams among others along with listening to Rush (not just for one day) will point out the flaws in Liberalism. A free market in education such as Hillsdale College would certainly improve our lives. Is there another school that the Constitution is required as a part of its core curriculum? Those “private” colleges such as Harvard, Yale, etc. are not free of public (taxes) support, but should be. As to the “black” mind, affirmative action along with the War on Poverty began the dissent of its “thinking”. Another thing that has contributed to our country’s downward spiral is the emphasis on college sports, primarily football and basketball. I say contributed because of the lack of an education in our high schools. How many colleges have had to create remedial courses just to teach reading, writing and math. Even with those courses, there are far to many athletes that graduate without those fundamentals. So, yes, these problems began in high school and in many cases even before then.